Dispatch acquires Baltimore’s Youreka Labs for undisclosed sum

Youreka Labs, the local startup whose innovative approach to job improvement and creation landed it atop the 2022 RealLIST Startups roster, has officially been acquired by B2B software solutions provider Dispatch, according to today’s joint statement.

The deal, which places the former company’s mobile automation tech under the Boston-based Dispatch’s auspices, took place less than a year after Youreka Labs spun out of Annapolis consulting company Synaptic Advisors. Dan Bergner, Youreka Labs’s cofounder, saw the acquisition as an opportunity to accelerate the impact of the company’s software on workforce development.

“It’s giving us this amazing opportunity to plug Youreka into a field service market we haven’t had the opportunity to tap historically,” Bergner told Technical.ly.

Bergner will join the executive team at Dispatch as general manager of Youreka Labs. The offices in Baltimore will remain and all employees at Youreka will join Dispatch, growing the team to over 100 employees. Former CEO and Baltimore tech scene veteran Bill Karpovich will remain with the company via a position Dispatch’s advisory board. The new development adds Youreka Labs to the long list of companies Karpovich helped grow and exited, including Digex, USi, Zenoss and Sonatype. Only one C-suite employee — CFO Greg Denicola — is transitioning out of the company.

Although the acquisition’s financial details were kept confidential. Dispatch’s CEO Pat Burns emphasized that the transaction would not compromise the presence Youreka Labs established in Baltimore.

“This is all about growth,” Burns said. “There was no aspect of cost-cutting in the investment thesis. We’re going to continue to have a strong presence in Baltimore. We’ll maintain that office, and I won’t be surprised if we outgrow it and have to get a new one in Baltimore soon.”

As for that anticipated growth, the company looks to expand its sales and customer support services, as well as a full range of software development roles. All positions are remote, with no requirement to be in the office. Experience with Salesforce, whose namesake parent’s venture arm Salesforce Ventures previously invested in Youreka Labs, is a major plus for any prospective hiree.

“My company is growing at [a] well-over 50% annual growth rate every year,”  Burns said. “You don’t necessarily need to hire individual people in a linear relationship with your growth. But you can do the math and imagine that we’ll probably be 50% bigger at the end of the year, and 50% bigger again the year after that.”

Donte Kirby is a 2020-2022 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs young journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported by the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation.