For Atlanta-based entrepreneur David Hailey, the pandemic marked both the death of one business and the birth of another.
His first business managed airline inventory using artificial intelligence and computer vision. But when the travel industry tanked, so did his company. He and his business partner went separate ways, but Hailey held on to the idea of using AI to catalogue inventory.
In May 2021, he founded Countifi with two part-time employees, taking the concept of his first business but expanding it to also helping hospitals and universities digitize, organize and tag their inventory through technology.
And Hailey is not alone in starting a business in the wake of the pandemic. Between 2020 and 2021, the total number of firms with employees on the payroll in metro Atlanta grew by more than 5,000, according to an analysis by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution of new census data released in the fall. This is the highest year-over-year growth since at least 2017, when the Census changed how they surveyed business owners.