As ServiceNow rapidly expands its local campus in San Diego, the company’s software-savvy employees are starting to spill out into the city’s startup scene, launching new businesses that look a lot different than most local startups.

Fast-growing startup Perspectium has taken center stage, raising millions in venture capital and employing nearly 100 in San Diego. But smaller operations are bubbling up in various spots in North County: DotWalk, NewRocket and Dreamtsoft.

These startups look a bit different than San Diego’s status quo. They’re building enterprise-grade software — not drones, computer chips or medtech sensors. And that’s thanks to their forebear: ServiceNow.

In a city better known for things like computer chips and wireless systems, ServiceNow is one of precious few software giants in San Diego. First founded in Solana Beach during the aftermath of the dot-com bust, ServiceNow was one of the earliest to the cloud trend. They built a software-as-a-service platform for the world’s largest corporations to manage their IT help requests online.



Today, ServiceNow is more like an operating system (like Windows) for enterprise-grade cloud applications. The software has become omnipresent in the business world, often categorized with the likes of Salesforce.

ServiceNow moved its headquarters to Silicon Valley in 2014 and has since grown into a $52 billion public company. But the company kept a big office in San Diego — and that fact is increasingly significant as time goes on.

Since 2016, ServiceNow’s stock has rocketed nearly 500 percent. The company recently experienced a jolt of growth, tacking $20 billion onto their market cap in the past six months alone.

Jim Bartolomea, director of global talent for engineering at ServiceNow, said the boom is almost overwhelming.

“We’re growing greater than 30 percent year-over-year revenue, and have been for some time,” Bartolomea said. “We’re hiring all sorts of positions: designers, quality engineers, applications engineers, mobile and user interface teams ... essentially, there isn’t a place on our technology stack where we don’t have open positions.”

San Diego is considered ServiceNow’s unofficial engineering hub, employing roughly 900 workers (with over 100 new San Diego jobs listed on their website).


As the company beefs up its local engineering hub, the talent pool for skilled software workers grows with it. And as their employee stock options became exceedingly valuable, many ex-ServiceNow engineers have the resources to venture out on their own.

When San Diegans think of tech giants churning out entrepreneurs, companies like Qualcomm (a behemoth of epic proportions at a $91 billion market cap) immediately come to mind. Ex-Qualcomm workers have founded well-known startups like Netradryne , Doctible , GroGuru, Yembo and Atlazo , among many others. This is part of the reason San Diego is a city best known for things like computer chips and sensors. As engineers become trained in one area of technology, they go to start companies of their own in similar fields. Giants beget mini versions of themselves.

ServiceNow is no exception. The software giant is training up sharp engineers who see problems they can solve in enterprise-level software — problems that were created, in part, due to the success of ServiceNow.

Here are four San Diego software startups doing interesting things in the ServiceNow arena.

