Startup XPRO opens HQ in downtown St. Pete
XPRO, a cloud-based supplier enablement solution company whose founder says it “will become St. Pete’s next unicorn,” has established a home base in the Morgan Stanley Tower.
XPRO, which relocated from its 3,000-square-foot space in the Rivergate Tower, also known as the Sykes building, several months ago, helps streamline and automate supplier management through a singular platform for data enrichment, payment enhancement, and loss and risk prevention.
Before opening in Tampa, the fintech firm was based in Colorado.
“The reason we went to Colorado was to find talent. What we realized was every single hire came from Florida,” said Osama Sabbah, President of XPRO. “Fast forward to after the Covid pandemic, we saw that Tampa was becoming a more corporate destination, but after some time, we decided to move to St. Pete because of its entrepreneurial spirit, and its environment matches our culture. We are confident we will become the next unicorn in St. Petersburg, helping it further establish its tech scene reputation.”
During the relocation process, the XPRO employees took a survey regarding their preferred workforce model, which ultimately determined that the team would work remotely and commute to the office twice a week. The new instilled model was also a factor in XPRO optimizing a smaller physical office footprint in St. Pete.
Sabbah said the team worked with the St. Petersburg Area Economic Development Corp. and Mack Feldman of Feldman Equities on securing the space.
XPRO’s permanent office space is currently undergoing renovations, which will be completed in a few months. Meanwhile, the firm is operating out of a temporary space in the same building with a hybrid workforce.
Sabbah, a Palestinian immigrant who moved to the U.S. when he was 17 years old, has served as a consultant for a handful of Fortune 500 companies in transforming their shared services into a center of excellence through automation and innovation.
Since XPRO launched four years ago, Sabbah said, the company has grown to over 24 team members in the U.S. and has raised over $2 million in a seed round led by Michigan-based Wickfield Capital LLC.
XPRO has also been recognized by Inc. 5000 as one of the fastest growing companies in America in addition to receiving high marks by other organizations.
While the company is known to work with major enterprises, Sabbah is focused on making the platform accessible across the board.
“After consulting for a decade and building a center for excellence for Fortune 500 companies, I came to realize no matter how large or small your organization is, it must have a robust supplier solution, if it doesn’t, you are comprising your organization and increasing risks,” Sabbah said. “These projects take years and millions of dollars to implement, which prevents any company at the enterprise level to have this infrastructure, so XPRO was born. It can be implemented in minutes versus years and costs thousands instead of millions, and most of all, it is a solution that doesn’t discriminate based on your size, industry or market trend – anybody can have it.”
Today, XPRO has eight employees in St. Petersburg.
Devin Noonan, the senior VP of growth operating a small XPRO office out of Miami, said the entire Florida team will ramp up with five to 10 new hires this year.
“We are slowly trying to take Florida by storm and our core operation in tech development will be based at the St. Petersburg office,” Noonan said.
