Rise of the Rest Returns to Atlanta After a Decade!

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When the Rise of the Rest bus first pulled into Atlanta in 2015, the city was already laying the groundwork to become a major player on the national innovation stage. Entrepreneurial communities were clustering, the city's infrastructure was evolving to better connect people and places, and Atlanta-born startups were scaling to generate visible success stories for the city.

A decade later, those early seeds have clearly begun to bear fruit. The Beltline is now a vibrant artery of a more walkable city. Tech Square has become the densest innovation district in the Southeast and Atlanta Tech Village (ATV) has expanded to its second location. Mailchimp's exit gave the ecosystem a major headline win. And Jewel Burks Solomon, whose startup PartPic won our pitch competition in 2015 and exited to Amazon in 2016, is now investing in the next generation of Atlanta founders.

Atlanta has always been a city of ambition. Now, its innovation economy is channeling that energy toward a singular goal: become a top-five tech hub in the U.S. The city's government defines that as launching more than 2,000 startups in the coming years, fueling them with more pre-seed and seed capital, and racking up early wins that signal "you can build here." As Donnie Beamer, the City of Atlanta's first Technology Advisor, put it, "If you set the moonshot and keep repeating it, it will happen."

With World Cup 2026 around the corner, the city knows it has the opportunity to showcase a thriving, entrepreneurial Atlanta on the world stage. Revisiting underscored a decade of progress and gave us a clear sense of where the city is headed in the next.

Building at the Speed of Atlanta

We started at Hermeus (a Rise Of The Rest portfolio company), where the race to hypersonic flight is unfolding in real time. Inside the factory, speed is both the product and the process. As co-founder and CTO Glenn Case noted while walking us through HQ, the U.S. has an opportunity to lead in hypersonics, and Hermeus is giving the country a running start.

For all its strength in aerospace (Georgia's top export industry), Atlanta still isn't widely regarded as a hard-tech hub. Reputation shapes where talent and capital flow, and Hermeus is helping shift that narrative, proving Atlanta can compete and lead in frontier, hardware-rich industries.

Engines of Community

At ATV's new Sylvan campus, built into two restored Hotel Row buildings, the conversation turned to density, perception, and collective goals. Can founders win here? Can they find the network, customers, and capital they need? Leaders across the table from the Mayor's office, local funds, accelerators, and startups agreed: the answer has to be yes.

Walking the blocks of South Downtown offered a glimpse of that future, where 57 historic buildings are being restored to turn a largely vacant neighborhood into a vibrant hub for business and community.

The building-from-within theme carried through at the Russell Innovation Center for Entrepreneurs (RICE), where President and CEO Jay Bailey summed up the sentiment: "We spin our own wool" - i.e., buy from each other, create local jobs, and circulate success throughout Atlanta's business community. Named for Herman J. Russell, one of America's first Black millionaires and a civic leader who saw entrepreneurship as a pathway to wealth, RICE carries his legacy forward on Atlanta's Westside, where we met entrepreneurs building towards that vision.

At lunch at The Lola with the Women's Entrepreneurship Initiative, we heard how Atlanta's communities built by and for women are making the ecosystem more connected and resilient. The conversation surfaced both progress and gaps: Atlanta's female founders are well-networked and resourceful, but still navigating a shortage of early capital and a fragmented landscape that makes scale harder to achieve. What emerged was a shared resolve to chip away at those barriers, together and on their own terms

A playbook worth borrowing: All three communities see each other as collaborators, not competition. ATV refers entrepreneurs to RICE, The Lola to ATV, RICE to The Lola. Each organization knows its lane and its value, and together, they're building a continuum of support designed to help founders start, scale, and stay rooted in Atlanta.

Corporates Leaning In

At Sage's Discovery Center in Ponce City Market, we saw how a global company is embedding itself in the local ecosystem, opening its doors to small businesses, showcasing AI-powered tools, and creating a space designed for community, not just employees and customers.

Architecture's New Playbook

At Cove, a startup born out of Georgia Tech's labs, we heard from founder and CEO Sandeep Ahuja about how her team is reengineering the architectural process using AI, streamlining the path from concept to construction while optimizing for cost, risk, and energy use.

Like hard tech, proptech isn't exactly a calling card for the city. Cove adds another stitch to Atlanta's expanding economic fabric - joining the city's broad base of industry innovation.

The Square at the Center

We ended the day where we started in 2015: at Tech Square, which is now home to more than 100 startups, 25 corporate innovation centers, and one of the nation's oldest university-affiliated incubators, ATDC. It's the beating heart of Atlanta's innovation economy, where students, founders, researchers, and corporates intersect daily, and is still actively growing.

In conversation with Steve Case, Georgia Tech President Ángel Cabrera reflected on how much the city has evolved in the last decade. "The challenge isn't talent," Cabrera noted. "It's knitting together industries and capital tightly enough to reach top-five tech hub status."

Both agreed that the city's next chapter will hinge as much on place as on policy or capital. Atlanta's advantage has always been its density of ideas and people, but the task ahead is to turn transient flows of students and engineers into long-term builders and investors. As Cabrera put it, "If you're in the innovation business, you're in the real estate business. You're creating the places that attract and convene people."

That formula is already reshaping the city: neighborhoods once overlooked are now magnets for entrepreneurs, and the energy that powered Atlanta's past reinvention is powering another. The consensus? The city has the talent, industry mix, and civic will. Now it needs more capital and concerted cohesion to reach top-five status.

What's Next

Atlanta built its reputation on being "too busy to hate." Today, it's too focused not to win. The past decade proved it can be the Southeast's growth engine. The next will test how well it can connect sectors, communities, and stories to cement its place as a true national hub.