Building Connectivity That Lasts: Adam Fish and the Vision Behind Ditto

11.17.2025

Adam Fish, CEO and Co-founder of Ditto, has a passion that’s impossible to miss: creating meaningful connections. Not just Wi-Fi signals or Bluetooth pairings, but the deeper kind of connection between people, technology, and moments that matter. An endurance athlete at heart, Adam had actually just completed the Hyrox fitness competition in Atlanta a few days before this interview — a testament to the same persistence and discipline he brings to building Ditto. This fascination with connection has shaped every chapter of his journey, from tinkering with early software as a kid to leading one of the most technically ambitious startups.

For Adam, connection isn’t just a technical challenge. It’s a human one.

From Medicine to Machines

Adam’s early path didn’t point toward Silicon Valley. Growing up, he was always tinkering — making movies in high school, building early web projects, and exploring how technology could help people collaborate in new ways. But he also excelled academically and followed that momentum into a dual-degree MD/MBA program in Kentucky.

On paper, it was a perfect blend of rigor and prestige. In reality, it left him restless. “I understood myself a little bit later in life than ideal, and realized after a year of med school that my skills are rooted in my love and fascination with computers,” he recalls. The more time he spent in the lab or lecture hall, the more he found himself drawn to the logic of systems and the ways information could move through networks.

So, he made a decision that would redefine his life and left the program entirely. It wasn’t an impulsive exit, but rather an act of courage and clarity.

A Bridge Back to Tech

In the months that followed, Adam sought a way to reconnect with the world of technology and startups, but from Kentucky, that wasn’t exactly easy. So he did something unconventional and interned at a venture capital firm.

That experience gave him a front-row seat to the startup ecosystem and reignited the technical passion he’d felt since childhood. He began evaluating early-stage software companies, studying what made some thrive while others failed. It also made something else clear. He wanted to be on the other side of the table – not funding founders, but being one.

The Frustration That Sparked a Breakthrough

The idea for Ditto can be traced back to Adam’s earliest coding experiments in the late 1990s. Back then, the web was young, wireless connections were unreliable, and mobile devices were primitive. As a young developer, Adam kept running into the same frustrating limitation — everything depended on the network. When a connection dropped, progress stopped.

His first venture, Roobiq, created a mobile-first CRM and gave him a deeper look into the problem. No matter how elegant the software, it was only as strong as its signal. That’s when he started asking a simple but radical question: What if devices could still sync, share, and collaborate even when the internet went down?

For years, that vision was ahead of its time. Then, around 2018, advances in Bluetooth, mobile hardware, and edge computing made the impossible possible. Adam and his team seized the moment and built Ditto, a modern peer-to-peer data sync platform that lets devices work seamlessly, online or off.

It was a bold bet on a simple idea that connection should never depend on connectivity.

 

From Concept to Commercialization

The first believers came from an unlikely place — the airline industry. A prominent U.S. airline in particular saw how Ditto’s offline sync could transform operations, ensuring critical data flowed even in the air. That early validation reframed Ditto’s value from purely technical to deeply operational. “We realized we weren’t just syncing data,” Adam says. “We were enabling business continuity.”

By proving measurable outcomes (not just uptime, but cost savings and efficiency), Ditto set itself apart from commodity cloud services. It wasn’t just software; it was infrastructure for resilience.

Scaling with Trust and Timing

Raising capital for a deep-tech company is rarely fast or easy, but Adam took a long-game approach. Ditto has now raised $136 million, a testament to investor trust and the patience required to build foundational technology. Adam’s philosophy is simple — raise from partners who value your mission, not just your metrics.

In the early years, he spent half his time coding and the other half cold-calling potential customers across industries from gaming and healthcare to transportation and beyond. That hustle forged the relationships and credibility that would later define Ditto’s growth.

Today, Adam’s role has evolved. Once a hands-on CTO, he now spends most of his time with customers — traveling to airports, logistics hubs, and enterprise campuses to understand their pain points in-person. In fact, relocating Ditto from San Francisco to Atlanta wasn’t just about cost. Proximity to the world’s busiest airport, a thriving talent pool, and rare density of Fortune 500 corporate customers positioned Ditto to lead in sectors where offline reliability matters most.

Real-World Impact and the Power of Engage

Ditto’s technology is now powering mission-critical systems across industries where reliability isn’t optional. From Chick-fil-A’s point-of-sale operations to wildfire response teams tracking live positions in the field, Ditto’s edge platform ensures that critical data keeps flowing, even when the network doesn’t.

For Adam, these use cases are proof that technology’s highest purpose is practical: to make life safer, smoother, and more connected. “When we help people stay connected in crisis, that’s when our work really shows up,” he says.

That same philosophy extends to how Ditto grows. Engage has become another inflection point, providing structured access to Fortune 500 customers and embedding Ditto deeper into a thriving ecosystem of innovators and operators who share a belief in building technology that solves real-world problems. Adam sees that community as a force multiplier for Ditto’s mission, leveraging Atlanta’s corporate network and collaborative spirit to expand into new industries, all while staying true to Ditto’s core goal: keeping people and systems connected when it matters most.

The Founder Equation

Adam’s journey is one of conviction, courage, and timing. From writing code in the 90s to leading a growth startup redefining connectivity, his through-line has never changed: build technology that keeps people and systems working, no matter what. For Adam, connection is more than a feature, it’s a lifeline.

And Ditto isn’t just a company. It’s the culmination of a lifelong belief that when technology keeps us connected, even in the hardest moments, it helps move humanity forward. 

In a world that seemingly depends on constant connectivity, Adam reminds us that what truly matters isn’t just how we connect, but why we connect. 

His personal equation for success? “Endurance + Timing + Relationships.”