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Tech Topics In This Article: Atlanta Tech Village, South Downtown
“This is how you start a year, y’all.”
That’s how Atlanta’s Mayor Andre Dickens addressed a crowded room in South Downtown Wednesday morning, as the local startup community gathered for the official opening of Atlanta Tech Village’s (ATV) new location. The 25 degree fahrenheit temperature didn’t deter founders, VCs, city councilmembers, and ecosystem builders from coming out to see what the South Downtown and Atlanta Tech Village teams — spearheaded by David Cummings, Jon Birdsong, and other prominent tech names in town — had created inside ATV’s second location.
This time last year it would be hard to imagine a gathering of a hundred people would happen in South Downtown, as the neighborhood grid was filled with abandoned pieces of real estate. But the ATV team spent the last year renovating the historic Sylvan Hotel on Atlanta’s Mitchell Street, a once-bustling commerce district that fell into disrepair over the last several decades.
Now, the building will be the primary office space for up-and-coming builders and innovators.
The goal is to create not just another startup hub, but an “innovation district” for startups with all the live-work-play amenities needed to bring people back to South Downtown’s business district.
“The next generation of Atlanta success stories will be written here in these historic downtown buildings,” Mayor Dickens added during the ribbon cutting ceremony. “A new generation of builders and dreamers [will find] the infrastructure, the resources, and the community they need to scale even faster.”

Inside The Village
Organizers invited guests at the ribbon-cutting ceremony to explore the new ATV space — a multi-story blank canvas where “Villagers” (entrepreneurs and tech employees working at ATV locations) are starting to move in.
“This is a historic moment,” Tech Alpharetta’s President and CEO Karen Cashion said while walking through the new building off Mitchell Street.
Similar to ATV’s Buckhead location, members can get singular office spaces and have access to conference rooms and community spaces to help grow their teams and their businesses. But there is a distinct flair to ATV’s Sylvan location. 100-year-old tile segments are kept and preserved, and odes to Atlanta’s history can be seen in the details surrounding the sleek new coworking spaces.
A look inside the new space here:
Making Moves In South Downtown
Changes at Atlanta Tech Village go beyond updates to its physical spaces. A significant leadership shift is also underway, with Aly Merritt stepping in as the new President of ATV.
Merritt, who was Atlanta Tech Village’s Managing Director since 2021, is a staple member of the Atlanta startup community, previously serving as Salesloft’s Chief of Staff and Head of Community. Merritt’s earliest memory of Atlanta Tech Village was from her early days at Salesloft, when the team was moving into an unfinished floor of the soon-to-be tech hub in Buckhead. She remembers the experience of moving floors as renovations kept going on around them…and even the experience of playing laser tag in one of the empty floors before the Buckead location was bustling office space.

“Everybody sees the end result [years] later with what the Village looks like. But we didn’t start with a big, sparkly, fully build-out space. When you joined, you built your own IKEA desk and that was a badge of honor. It grew a little bit at a time…it was kind of like a software MVP,” she told Hypepotamus. “It was a bonding moment where everybody felt like they were invested in helping Atlanta Tech Village grow and turn into the community that it became. And you were a part of not only your individual startup team, but the Atlanta Tech Village team, too.”
With her new role, Merritt will be instrumental in helping build that same sense of camaraderie in ATV’s South Downtown location. As she describes it, it is about creating “one community [in] two spaces.”
“As we add another [ATV] space, the complexity is, how do we continue that story?,” Merritt added. “[We want it to feel] like an actual trilogy or a series instead of separate books in the library.”
The South Downtown location will eventually have all the community events those who visit the ATV Buckhead location have come to know well, including Startup Chowdown, advisor hours, and wellness support. But the new location will also have a unique opportunity to build up and support the neighborhood’s growth and revitalization efforts, further embedded Atlanta’s startup successes into the fabric of the city’s business community.
Want to see how the historic Sylvan Hotel transformed into a startup workspace? Some photos from the renovation process here:
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