Welcome to our Ecosystem Highlight series, where you’ll meet the innovators in our vast ecosystem of startup builders from across Florida, who are actively solving some of the world’s greatest challenges. We interviewed Christina Dills, Founder & CEO of Smart Edge Technologies, an AI Transformation platform for SMB featuring SortIQ and SmartPath AI native solutions for retail and donation organizations.

What were you doing previously, and what inspired you to join, launch, or help grow your company?

I spent 13 years at Microsoft as a leader of the OEM channel across Latin America, and I was there at the birth of SaaS, watching businesses race to modernize. But I kept seeing the same gap: emerging technology like IoT, AI, and blockchain never made it down to SMBs at a price point or simplicity they could actually use. That gap is exactly what inspired me to launch my company. I wanted to bring the same transformative tech to small and medium businesses, tailored to them, without the enterprise price tag. AI has simply become the sharpest version of that mission yet: the same modernization, now with far more powerful tools.

What pain point is your company solving? What gets you excited to go to work every day?

I built an agentic engineering system which is essentially an SMB product factory — that cuts the cost of custom builds by 75% and delivers them 4x faster than traditional development. That system is what let me create AI-native products like SortIQ (Meta Glasses for sorting secondhand goods) and SmartPath (a warehouse management system) at a fraction of normal cost. It means I can take an SMB to a fully custom AI native application in weeks instead of months, at roughly 25% of the usual cost — tailored, not templated. Watching enterprise-grade capability become genuinely accessible to a small business, in real time, is what gets me up every morning.

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced in helping build or scale the company? How did you overcome it?

Being a startup, full stop. The Microsoft name used to open doors instantly, and without it, I had to earn credibility and confidence from zero, deal by deal. I overcame it by growing where I was planted: I learned an entirely new game — entrepreneurship is nothing like corporate — and I put myself out there relentlessly, pitching every contest and every room that would have me. Winning eventually became my first big break, and I used it to build more credibility, stack certifications, and lean on a network that already trusted my work ethic to bring in clients.

Where do you see your company headed next?

Real, practical, incremental AI adoption for SMBs — giving them genuine access to enterprise-grade systems they can actually use to be more productive and profitable. I’m a Claude implementation partner, and I’ve built four AI-native products from that foundation. The next chapter is scaling that product engine and proving that a small business can get enterprise-caliber AI tools built and deployed on a small-business timeline and budget.

Give us a tactical piece of advice that you’d share with someone building or growing a company.

Don’t wait until you’re ready — readiness is a myth entrepreneurs tell themselves to stay safe. The only true failure is quitting. Put yourself in every room, pitch every stage, and treat every rejection as data, not a verdict. Then stay flexible enough to let your customers rewrite your roadmap. The business you launch with is rarely the business that wins. Build the plane while you’re flying it, and trust that the version 2.0 of your idea, shaped by real market feedback, will always outperform the “perfect” plan you started with.

Why Florida?

Florida isn’t just a beach backdrop, it’s the 14th largest economy in the world and a genuine crossroads for innovation, not just tourism. My fluency in Spanish and my years running LATAM channel strategy make Florida a strategic home base: I’m positioned at the intersection of the U.S. and Latin American markets, exactly where the next wave of SMB innovation is going to be built.

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