Tech Talent Seals Deal for Canadian Firm’s Atlanta Headquarters

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on Hypepotamus. It is published on Global Atlanta as part of our content partnership with the Southeast’s top source for innovation news. Sign up for Hypepotamus newsletters here. 

When Ontario, Canada-based Geotab started hunting for a perfect spot to plant the flag for its U.S. headquarters, the 25-year-old telematics company had its pick of tech-friendly cities. The three finalists included Raleigh, Dallas and Atlanta.

But a clear choice emerged quickly, said Mike Branch, Geotab’s VP of data and analytics, who has been with the company since 2016. And it was Atlanta’s engineering, data, and AI talent pipeline from local universities that tipped the scales in its favor.

That engineering talent is central to Geotab, since the company processes 100 billion geospatial data points a day from almost 5 million connected vehicles.

The company serves customers who have fleets of all sizes (think everything from small delivery companies to massive enterprise fleets). The platform helps fleet managers track assets, deploy dash cams, optimize dispatch routes, and tackle the endless puzzle of keeping vehicles moving efficiently.

The company’s customer roster reads like a who’s who of American logistics: the U.S. federal government, USPS, and PepsiCo all rely on Geotab’s connected hub to make sense of their commercial vehicle data. While still in its pilot phase, its generative AI model Geotab Ace has helped 1,500 U.S. companies better collect and understand data around transportation safety.

Since its founding in 2000, safety has been at the core of what Geotab is building.

“I always think there’s three core outcomes that we’re helping our customers with, and that is driving down collisions, reducing [fleet] downtime to productivity, and driving down emissions,” Branch told Hypepotamus.

Putting Down Roots In Atlanta

Even before setting up its office in the Southern Dairies office area near Ponce City Market, Geotab already had an established connection to Atlanta’s tech scene with a partnership with The Ray, a “living laboratory” in Georgia for the transportation industry.

But now with 2,400 employees globally and 400 in the U.S., Geotab is now betting big on Atlanta’s tech scene with its hiring plans.

“Everything that we do is engineering for the long term,” Branch told Hypepotamus when asked about why Atlanta tech talent should join Geotab.

The company is planning to triple its Atlanta-based workforce over the next three years, and several employees have already relocated from Canada and across the U.S. to help build out the office.

But if you aren’t looking to join Geotab’s team right now, you can still benefit from Geotab’s presence in Atlanta. Its ‘Altitude by Geotab’ spin-off is already developing traffic congestion models for Atlanta transportation planning and policy studies (something that might finally explain why your 45-minute commute covers all of three miles on Peachtree).