Global Atlanta's Dispatch to South Africa was made possible through a partnership with Ethiopian Airlines. Via its nonstop flight from Atlanta to Addis Ababa, the airline offers local business and leisure travelers convenient one-stop access to the South African cities of Johannesburg and Cape Town.
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When Adrien Erasmus started flying to the U.S. from Cape Town for business, he inevitably found himself coming through Atlanta.
The new nonstop flight, launched in late 2022 after a concerted push by local boosters, opened doors for Warp Development, a 23-year-old venture providing outsourced software development and managed IT services to a range of clients, from startups to sophisticated corporates.
“Such a simple thing like a flight can connect two continents,” Mr. Erasmus said. “It can really just spark the idea of potential business.”
At first, he was visiting clients on the West Coast, but he began stopping off in Atlanta, meeting with the local chapter of founder support group Entrepreneurs Organization, or EO, to learn about the city’s tech ecosystem, and networking at places like Ponce City Market and the Atlanta Tech Village.
But, perhaps lesser known than cities like San Francisco, Seattle or New York, Atlanta remained a bit of an enigma for Mr. Erasmus, who lives in the picturesque Somerset West wine region near Cape Town.
“I was like, wow, what do you do here? (Atlanta) doesn’t have ocean or massive natural beach.”
As he began to make inroads with customers in fintech, health tech, insurance and e-commerce, he found the answer: “You do business here.”
Warp’s push into Atlanta is being encouraged by Wesgro, the economic development agency for the Western Cape province, of which Cape Town is the capital.
Atlanta received a big brand boost across South Africa last year when the U.S. Embassy launched the Atlanta Phambili initiative, bringing a bevy of banks, investors and government officials to the city. The goal, as stated by former U.S. Ambassador Reuben Brigety, was to make it the focal point for the productive aspects of the bilateral relationship, including business, trade and tourism.
Wesgro had already been cultivating relationships, both with individual companies and through organizations like the Atlanta Black Chambers, which sent a delegation to its Made in the Cape conference in 2023. In Atlanta, Wesgro hoped to court buyers of the Western Cape’s agricultural goods, from its well-known wines to its upstart olive oil, all while finding consumers for Cape Town’s growing tech services.
For its part, Warp just recently hired its seventh person to support business from Atlanta, adding to some 100 engineers spread mostly across Cape Town and Pretoria, the South African capital just north of Johannesburg. As it has in Australia, the company is looking at setting up a sales office in Atlanta, perhaps hiring three to four people as it continues to build out the U.S. business.
But in a world of options, including more established outsourcing destinations like India or Argentina, why would customers pick South Africa?
For Mr. Erasmus, it amounts to the company, the culture and the cost. Warp, he says, is able to hire expert tech talent at a fraction of what American companies would pay for similar resources domestically.
Warp’s deep experience building new products and apps, from buy-now-pay-later and purchase-order financing to medical insurance and billing, means it has the versatility to compete in a world being upended by artificial intelligence.
“A single discipline has become obsolete,” Mr. Erasmus said about the effects of generative AI. “We just build more stuff quickly — it’s not like it stops. Innovation has just accelerated so much in a short amount of time.”
The South African and U.S. business cultures also meld together well, he added.
“We love doing business with the U.S. because you guys make decisions fast and quick. If the service is good, you never try to strike an unfair deal only to swing to one party’s advantage,” he said.
South Africans may be often be more direct, but that can be good with collaborative cross-border projects. “We don’t sugarcoat it, but we’re very loyal and hardworking.”
On Warp’s side, there is also a practical aspect of U.S. expansion: South African firms covet U.S. dollars as the rand has continued to slide against a basket of international currencies, denting buying power for South African companies operating globally.
Whether it’s providing a fractional CTO, project management or dedicated developers, the hardest thing in outsourced software is keeping a consistent company culture, Mr. Erasmus said, which Warp is able to offer thanks to its longevity and unity, with most of its developers sitting in South Africa.
It also helps, he says, in a market like Atlanta, where relationships are just as important as transactions.
“Trust is absolutely what buys— and sells. No amount of any sort of marketing — paid, Google ad words, or LinkedIn strategy — can beat a good old handshake and looking somebody in the eye and doing business in person. It’s creative, it’s fun — I love the fun of it.”
On the next trip, he may forgo taking what he described as a harrowing Greyhound bus journey from Nashville to St. Louis for a client meeting. But Mr. Erasmus says Warp’s adventure in the Southeast is just getting started.
“I love what I do but I don’t do it for love, if that makes sense. I just love meeting people and building trust and building a relationship that has got true authenticity and longevity and real partnership, not just something that’s just delivery-driven all the time, but something much more deep.”
