Why AI Startup Obvious Sees Atlanta as A Strong In-Person Hub
ATLANTA, September 24 (Hypepotamus) - The team behind Obvious, currently made up of 35 employees, is distributed. But when anyone wants to travel into their Atlanta office and hub, they have a house nearby to stay out and rent through an internal app.
And that employee app? It was built using Obvious.
It’s a small example of what CEO David Boskovic wants the company’s AI workspace to do: help people turn an idea into a reality quickly. In Obvious, people and AI agents work in a shared space to research, write code, build apps and review the results together. Boskovic describes the multi-player AI workspace’s mission as helping teams “build things faster.” (And they have the case studies to prove that "faster" part).
Gridline helps advisory firms launch, operate, and scale private market investment programs through one integrated platform.
“Building The Company We Were Afraid Would Eat Our Lunch”
Boskovic first built Flatfile, a data onboarding product that will be familiar to Venture Atlanta attendees in 2020.
The company raised a $50 million Series B in 2022, bringing its total funding at the time to nearly $95 million, according to Crunchbase. Tiger Global Management, Alumni Ventures, Gaingels, Founder Collective, and Quiet Capital are part of the company’s cap table.
But as AI agents became more capable, Boskovic began to question what a software company would look like next. He said the team spent months “building the company they were afraid would eat [their] lunch.”
That work became Obvious, a broader AI workspace. Flatfile remains a separate, supported product.
Boskovic said it is still early for tools like Obvious, though the company is seeing intense quarter-over-quarter growth and interest from software builders, product managers and engineers. For him, the bigger question is what happens when teams can make an app in hours instead of months.
“So, what’s worth building in the future?” he told Hypepotamus. “Products are no longer defensible…but that was never the hard part.” His point is that faster building gives teams more room to pursue ideas and improve what they make.
“Your ambition goes through the roof when cost and time go down,” he said.
That view also shapes his response to the AI “doomerism” out there right now, which suggests that agents will cause mass layoffs and job displacement. Boskovic sees an opportunity for people to spend less time getting a first version built and more time deciding what to create and making it better.
Maija Ehlinger
Atlanta As A Landing, And Launching, Pad
Obvious opened an Atlanta office this year for local employees and colleagues traveling in. Boskovic said the city’s airport makes that arrangement practical for a distributed team.
Atlanta is also part of how Obvious introduces people to its product. The company is investing in in-person events where teams can work with the tools directly.
Its October 29 Atlanta event, for example, is designed for engineering, design and product leaders to build with agents in their own codebases.
For a company selling AI software, Boskovic said getting people in a room is a deliberate choice. But he doesn’t think that work requires a Silicon Valley address.
“AI is a massive equalizer,” he added. “There is no special access you get from being in SF.”
See more Hypepotamus stories in your search results
Featured Photo by Ronny Sison / Unsplash
