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 Evan O’Connell, Founder of DigiNetics, which provides a non-intrusive operational audit layer that plugs into legacy ERPs to flag job-costing drift and margin leaks in real time.

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

Prior to founding DigiNetics, I was wrapping up my degree at the University of Alabama while completing internships across commercial real estate development, corporate land operations, and financial services. Across every industry I worked in, from large-scale corporate management to multi-unit operations, I kept seeing the same pattern: Companies are sitting on vast seas of data, but don’t know how to properly utilize it to make better decisions to improve their company.

Having a background as a former All-American athlete, I’ve always been obsessed with performance, metrics, and eliminating inefficiency. I realized that companies didn’t need another massive, expensive software migration- they needed an intelligent layer in their business to allow them to innovate and adopt AI. That gap in the market was the spark that led to the creation of DigiNetics.

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

DigiNetics solves the silent margin degradation that plagues multi-unit and field-heavy middle-market platforms. Operators frequently lose 2% to 5% of their gross margin due to uncaptured job-cost variance, delayed field logging, and fragmented software stacks. We provide a lightweight operational intelligence layer that plugs directly behind legacy systems to automatically detect and flag job-costing drift and operational leaks before board decks are finalized.

What gets me excited every single day is delivering immediate, tangible EBITDA defense to operators. There is nothing more satisfying than sitting down with a leadership team, connecting our system, and showing them actionable insights.

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

Our biggest initial challenge was overcoming the market’s “software fatigue.” We overcame this by refining our core value proposition around absolute frictionlessness. Instead of asking companies to replace their software, we engineered our setup to sit quietly behind their existing tools, requiring zero IT lift. Proving that we could deliver immediate operational visibility without disturbing their ongoing day-to-day operations.

Where do you see your company headed next?

We are focused on expanding our operational audit footprint across high-density middle-market platforms, particularly within regional roll-ups, field services, and industrial platforms across the Southeast. As we scale our system intelligence, our goal is to become the standard automated operational health layer for private equity-backed platforms giving operators and value creation teams real-time margin defense across every portfolio addition.

Give us a tactical piece of advice that you’d share with a founder just starting out.

You will hear more no’s than yes’s; it’s incredibly important that you don’t let the no’s burn your momentum and conviction in your company and product.

Why Florida?

Florida and Tampa in particular are experiencing an unprecedented surge of entrepreneurial energy, capital, and middle-market growth. Moving our operations here was a strategic decision: the state offers an incredible ecosystem of high-growth platforms, a business-friendly environment, and a tight-knit tech community centered around hubs like Embarc Collective. There’s no better place in the country right now to build a category-defining B2B enterprise company.

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