Tech exodus begins? AI startup Andi bids adieu to Miami, moves to San Francisco 

Startup Andi is bidding adieu to Miami and moving to San Francisco, further chipping away at the yearslong hype over the Magic City becoming a tech mecca. 

Andi will open its headquarters at 600 California Street in San Francisco’s Financial District, according to the San Francisco Business Times, which first reported the story. The firm wants to be close to the Bay Area’s artificial intelligence talent and venture capital firms, Angela Hoover, CEO of Andi, told the publication. 

Founded in 2021, Andi is the maker of an AI-powered chatbot that offers a different option from search engines such as Google. The tool provides responses to questions that are targeted to the user’s query and skips ads and clickbait pages. 

Over the past three years, tech firms left San Francisco and homed in on cities such as Miami. Since late 2020, Miami’s real estate industry and Mayor Francis Suarez have buzzed over the city becoming a magnet for tech firms. Firms such as venture capital companies Founders Fund and Atomic inked deals in Miami’s Wynwood, a prime choice among tech firms and their venture capital backers. 

Yet, tech firms still have a stronger real estate presence in the Bay Area than in Miami. During the first five months of this year, tech leases signed in the Bay Area represented 23 percent of all office deals in that region, and 51 percent of the office square footage leased, according to data provided by CompStak, a crowdsourced database. This was bigger than South Florida’s share of tech deals. In the South Florida tri-county region, tech leases represented 5.9 percent of all office deals and 29 percent of the square footage leased. 

This year, San Francisco again started attracting AI-focused tech firms due to the amount of VC funding being pumped into the industry. The city experienced $5.3 billion in funding for AI companies during the first half of this year, The San Francisco Standard reported. 

— Lidia Dinkova