A South Florida information technology unicorn has big hiring plans following its expansion to Orlando.
Miami-based Kaseya in October moved into a 35,000-square-foot Orlando office in SouthPark Center at 8427 Southpark Circle.
The company already employs 125 people in Orlando, which Kaseya has deemed its global center of excellence for technical support, and the firm plans to ramp up its local workforce to 1,000 by the end of 2024, Chief Operating Officer Joe Smolarski told Orlando Inno.
A company of nearly 5,000 employees with dozens of offices around the world, Kaseya provides unified IT and security management software. The company in 2019 became a unicorn, a term for a private business valued at $1 billion or more.
The 22-year-old firm has scaled to 2,200 employees in Miami. However, Kaseya wanted to stand up another center of excellence in the Sunshine State beyond Miami, Smolarski said.
Kaseya picked Orlando for a couple of reasons: Orlando’s talent pool and the planned Brightline rail route from Miami to Orlando, Smolarski said. “Some of those us from the Northeast are used to jumping on a train to go from Boston to Philly to Washington, D.C. That’s clearly a key driver for us.”
Smolarski described Kaseya as a “hyper-growth company” that has exploded in size from 800 people in 2018 to nearly 5,000 today. Kasey will bring that same rapid growth mindset to its Orlando center of excellence, a technical support hub for 50,000 Kaseya customers.
It only took Kaseya 60 days to hire its first 125 employees, and Smolarski said the company expects to have 350 local workers in the next eight months.
The Kaseya deal is a bright spot in a slowed office sector, said Harbert Realty Services Senior Vice President and Managing Director Damien Madsen, who represented the landlord in the 10-year lease deal.
“A lot of companies are giving back space because employees can work from home,” Madsen told Orlando Inno. “That’s not a trend; that’s going to be a permanent thing. You have to replace those vacancies with new sectors. We’re looking at tech, modeling/simulation/training and aerospace.”
CBRE Group Inc. Senior Vice President Christopher Sproles and Senior Associate Conor Dolan represented Kaseya.
While some tech companies led the charge into remote work in 2020, others are sticking with physical offices.
For an example, look no further than another SouthPark Center tenant: OneRail. The Orlando-based last-mile logistics startup this year doubled its footprint at the office complex to 36,000 square feet.
OneRail inked its original lease in SouthPark Center in early 2021, when many companies were shedding office space. The ability to have employees together in an office was critical to building a company culture at the young, fast-growing startup, CEO Bill Catania recently told Orlando Inno. “We were the oddballs that said ‘No, we want to work in the office.’ ”
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