Melissa Medina, co-founder and CEO of eMerge Americas, has spent 12 years turning introductions, capital and institutional access into Miami’s technology infrastructure.
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“There was a lot of interesting activity going on in Miami, but it wasn’t collaborative and it wasn’t working together,” Jaret Davis, senior vice president and co-managing shareholder of Greenberg Traurig’s Miami office, told me over Zoom as we discussed eMerge Americas, the global technology conference.
“We concluded there needed to be a force that could be a convening power. Then we found that when each of us were traveling around the world, I would go to Norway, I’d go to Montreal, I would go to England, I would go to a number of countries, and they would learn what I was working on, and they’d say, ‘oh, that’s great, are you in the Valley? Are you in New York? Are you in the Research Triangle?’ And I would say, ‘No, I’m in Miami,’ and they would give a curious look.”
Melissa Medina, co-founder and CEO of eMerge Americas, encountered the same look from the other side of a sales call. “We would travel all over the world selling our products and services,” she told me. “And everyone would ask, ‘Why are you headquartered in Miami?’”
The company was Terremark Worldwide, the data-center business her father, Manny Medina, sold to Verizon in 2011 for $2 billion, with Davis’s firm handling the transaction. “CNBC exploded,” Davis recalled, “saying, ‘What is going on in Miami?’” The question lingered because nobody quite knew how to answer it.
In 2012, Miami was more vice than vocation for serious technologists. Its beaches, nightlife and celebrity orbit reinforced the image of a transient resort town where ambitious engineering students fled north as soon as their degrees arrived.
My own move to Miami five years ago was in pursuit of a special kind of luxury that comes after 30 years of clawing my way into the upper financial echelons of my field to begin a mostly relaxed life of leisure as a Forbes contributor. I never seriously considered the city a likely source of the six-figure contracts I routinely secured from New York, the tri-state area and international clients. Medina and Davis, however, suggested I lacked information, imagination and, most importantly, introductions, at the time of my arrival.
Those introductions now carry more commercial weight. By Medina’s count, South Florida sat outside the top 50 American metros for venture activity when eMerge opened in 2014. Current reporting tied to eMerge’s 2025 Annual Insights Report placed South Florida ninth nationally for deal value and deal count, while Florida was fifth by deal count among states.
eMerge startup-showcase alumni have raised more than $4 billion, while Citadel, Blackstone and Thoma Bravo have all established a meaningful South Florida presence. The 2026 eMerge Americas conference drew more than 20,000 attendees from more than 60 countries, with Emil Michael, Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, among its headline speakers.
Global financial institutions are absorbing prime real estate across the city as international founders scramble to establish U.S. beachheads in South Florida. Public consensus assumes Miami seduced Wall Street and Silicon Valley purely through tax arbitrage and sunshine. That assumption is fundamentally flawed.
“There are New Yorkers, Californians, Chicagoans, and people from the rest of the world looking at South Florida,” Davis said. “When you have that many people, that much of a critical mass interested in moving to a jurisdiction, people are naturally going to say, ‘I need to know also why that’s happening.’”
He continued, “All the CEOs and all the managing directors I talk to say the same thing. They said, especially the first wave or first two waves, the tax situation is what caused us to do the first glance, but then when we saw the asset base that was there, that’s what closed the deal.”
At the center sits eMerge Americas, answering “here” to every strategic question a C-suite asks during expansion: Where can leadership reach capital? Where can a founder find talent, customers, government, universities and prospective partners without constructing every relationship from zero? Where can an international company enter the United States while retaining commercial proximity to Latin America and Europe? And where might one credible introduction spare corporate development another quarter of cold outreach?
eMerge Americas Converts The “Miami Nice” Culture Into Enterprise Value
Jaret Davis, senior vice president of Greenberg Traurig, joins Kaseya CEO Rania Succar onstage at eMerge Americas, where Miami’s power brokers and technology leaders increasingly occupy the same room.
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“The town has an inner circle of about a thousand people, maybe more now, that sort of are the gatekeepers,” Davis told me. “But penetrating that circle is far easier, I think, than in most cities in the world. You don’t have to be on a waitlist, you don’t have to have a certain surname. You can literally be anyone and move here.”
He likened it to old England’s letter of introduction: “You’re under seal, I vouch for this person.”
Brian Brackeen, an early tech transplant from San Francisco, documented this phenomenon in 2013 in an essay Davis directed me to called “Miami Nice.” At startup networking event, Brackeen met Wifredo Fernandez, now director of global government affairs at SpaceXAI, but at the time, co-founder and CEO of The LAB Miami.
Fernandez introduced Brackeen to Matt Haggman of the Knight Foundation, who introduced him to Juan Pablo Cappello and Marco Giberti, who joined his seed round as angel investors before submitting his name to speak at a Hispanic Unity of Florida event. There, he met Yvonne Lopez, whose introduction to the City of Coconut Creek’s IT director put his facial-recognition startup in line for its first government customer.
“Once you’ve penetrated, the connectivity, the introductions, become extremely easy,” Davis added. “You can get into a lot of doors pretty easily, and once you’re in those doors, it’s organic. It’s just going to keep growing, the tentacles will keep going, and next thing you know, you’re all over.”
Miami doesn’t lock outsiders out, but it does require an audition. eMerge Americas has created a stage for that performance.
“When entrepreneurs who are not from here spend time in South Florida as part of the program,” Medina told me. “What we’re hearing is, ‘Wow, we were able to connect with so many decision-makers. We didn’t realize the massive network that’s here that you could build and scale.’ So a lot of this is also just educating, continuing the narrative, and putting out these success stories.”
The difference between Miami hospitality and Miami access is the difference between meeting someone and being introduced by them. eMerge Americas’ ambition is to make the second outcome more probable.
eMerge Americas Foundation In Passion And Frustration
Manny Medina and daughter Melissa Medina, the father-daughter team whose bet on Miami helped turn eMerge Americas from a “crazy idea” into one of South Florida’s most consequential technology convenings.
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“It was born out of a place of two very distinct emotions: passion and frustration,” Medina said of eMerge Americas’ origins. “The frustration is that working at a tech company for many years based out of Miami was very difficult. It was difficult to hire talent, it was difficult to evangelize Miami and South Florida as a tech hub.”
Founded in 2014, eMerge Americas predates the relocation announcements, venture-capital headlines and the familiar question of whether South Florida has become a durable business center or merely a warm-weather refuge for people tired of paying Manhattan rent. After COVID made Zoom the gold standard for business meetings, I fell squarely into the latter category.
“We realized there needed to be a force that could convene all the different aspects of this community,” Davis added. “And then, secondly, a force of evangelization to the outside world. That’s really what was the driving force for eMerge, to accomplish those two items. eMerge was born in the multipurpose room of Greenberg Traurig. That was literally the location of the initial steering committee that would eventually become eMerge.”
Medina and her father studied technology hubs around the world before launching. The common denominator, she said, was “a large convening, bringing together the ecosystem: entrepreneurs, investors, global corporations, government and academia.”
Twelve years of compounding later, eMerge has become a year-round platform with global programming, three accelerator programs and a twice-yearly venture report. Its four stated areas of concentration are deep tech, national security, health tech and fintech, chosen, Medina said, because that’s where its network runs deepest. The proof of legitimacy now is who asks for whom.
“We don’t get the same questions we got in the beginning. ‘Why Miami, why would you do that there, are we really going to meet entrepreneurs we can invest in’,” she noted. “Now it’s the opposite. ‘How can we be involved?’ We have funds asking us, ‘can we get first access to your accelerator founders.’”
eMerge Americas Compresses The Distance To Opportunity
(l-R) Manny Medina, Armando Christian Pérez (Pitbull), Melissa Medina and former Miami Mayor Francis Suarez in the kind of collision between entrepreneurship, culture and civic power that eMerge Americas has made distinctly Miami.
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“The ones who follow up post-conference are the ones with the most success,” Medina advised. “Because you never know what a conversation that happened in a workshop, or meeting someone at the conference for 10 minutes, could lead to. And if you don’t follow up, well, that’s kind of where that ends.”
eMerge Americas is a curated catalyst, where returns depend entirely on a founder’s focus. For AE Studio, an AI research and development company, generic startup visibility wasn’t the appeal. Chief Scientist Diogo Schwerz de Lucena said the company was trying to attract more government investment into AI-alignment and safety research, with DARPA among the institutions it considered particularly relevant.
“Because eMerge would have a lot of people that are somewhat related to DARPA, we thought it would be a good place to connect with people,” Schwerz de Lucena said. “We managed to talk to a lot of folks that were not aware of the existence of the type of work that we’re doing.”
AE Studio’s CEO appeared on a panel with a DARPA director and an Army representative, while the company met government and cybersecurity contacts Schwerz de Lucena considered useful to scaling its work.
Spanish AI company Zylon arrived through ICEX Spain Trade and Investment, whose collaboration with eMerge Americas led the company to apply for and be selected for the startup showcase.
“At this time, actually, literally,” Daniel Gallego Vico, Zylon’s co-founder and CEO, confided during our Zoom call. “My co-founder is presenting a demo of Zylon to one of the prospects we met at the conference, a U.S. bank.”
His first trip to Miami and first eMerge, Gallego Vico validated Davis’s thesis that securing a single foot in the door causes the door to swing open wider. “There was kind of an effect of people telling other people, ‘You should go and talk to Zylon,’” he said. “People that talked to us on Thursday referred us to others that came to talk to us on Friday.”
GovSignals co-founder Jeremy Doochin supplied another qualification. His South Florida-based government-procurement software company builds software for established government contractors. His ideal customer is generally farther along than many startups roaming a technology conference floor. Nonetheless, “I did find eMerge worthwhile,” Doochin said. “It is not perfectly our clientele, but there were definitely people we enjoyed meeting and some large companies.”
Doochin relocated to Miami from California four years earlier to scale his entrepreneurial footprint. Federal contracting, as he describes it, was “kind of this legacy department store, where you had to have relationships and reputation, and old money.” Dismantling that requires introductions.
“I’ve found my best networks here to be the people who often moved here, who are entrepreneurs, who maybe sold a business, like I did, and wanted good quality people.”
eMerge Americas And The C-Suite Case For Miami
Billionaire real estate developer and philanthropist Stephen Ross (center) speaking on a panel at an eMerge Americas event alongside Florida Council of 100 CEO Mike Simas and eMerge Americas President Melissa Medina.
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“Here we are, 12 years later, with a long journey, a roller-coaster ride, a lot of growth, and much more than a conference now,” Medina said. “We’re a year-round platform. We have three different accelerator programs, we track venture activity and publish it twice a year, and we have a full team. It’s evolved in parallel with so much growth that we’ve seen across what we’re now calling the Gold Coast, South Florida, and really across the state.”
For the C-suite considering whether to hitch a wagon to Miami’s new frontier, here’s the playbook for knowing how to prospect before joining the gold rush.
Map The Gatekeepers Before You Pitch: Institutional trust isn’t distributed democratically. It accumulates around a relatively small group of conveners, advisers, investors, operators and civic figures who understand how the local market works. Don’t begin with generic investor lists. Identify the law firms, foundational partners, industry organizations and regional connectors capable of making an introduction that carries weight.
Understand The Bilateral Vector: Miami’s appeal extends beyond domestic tax relief. A South Florida base offers commercial proximity to North America, Latin America and Europe, making it a credible landing point for companies entering the U.S. market or expanding across the Americas. Treating the region as a retirement destination with a financial district misses the larger commercial geography.
Measure Convenings By Conversion: A packed schedule and a pile of business cards don’t establish ROI. Track qualified prospects, second meetings, investor conversations, partnership discussions, customer opportunities, recruiting leads and market intelligence that changes an operating decision. Then use that record to determine whether a deeper regional commitment makes financial sense.
Make Follow-Up The Actual Deliverable: The conversation on the exhibition floor is only the opening sequence. Commercial value is created by the person who owns the next step, sends the material, builds the second meeting and keeps the relationship warm enough to become useful.
Don’t Mistake Relationship Building For Transactional Access: Newcomers can find any relationship-driven market opaque, especially when they arrive expecting immediate results. But a credible entry strategy requires time, social proof and reciprocal value. If leadership wants a fast transaction from a market built on long-term trust, it may conclude the city is closed when it has simply arrived without the right map.
“A lot of companies are starting to wake up to the fact that there’s a bilateral vector,” Davis added. “That if you go with Miami, you’ve got North America and Central and South America, and frankly, you’ve got pretty good connectivity to Europe. And so, as every business becomes global, people are realizing that Miami is one of the optimal jumping points for that.”
But Miami shouldn’t be mistaken for Silicon Valley with palm trees. eMerge Americas has made clear the Magic City is a still-emerging network of technology, finance, government, universities and international markets, built atop commercial infrastructure South Florida possessed long before the rest of the country came looking for gold.
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