Intellibus seeking a home in Jamaica
Published:Friday | October 17, 2025 | 12:05 AMLuke Douglas - Senior Business Reporter
Having operated out of a Kingston hotel for months, fintech consulting firm Intellibus is on the hunt for office space to establish its presence in Jamaica.
Principal and founder of Intellibus Ed Watal said the American company is now registered in Jamaica and seeking a home for its software engineering business as well as its AI training operation to ready recruits for upcoming jobs.
“We have been actively looking for a physical presence in Jamaica, as we have leased this space in the AC Hotel continuously since April and we are definitely going to continue to use this space,” Watal said in an interview with the Financial Gleaner.
“We are actively in conversation with realtors, local real estate firms, and even development banks in the region who want to help us set up a facility,” he said.
The company, which is headquartered in the United States, says it has hired around 50 tech graduates and students in Jamaica to service its clients in the US.
Watal said he is seeking a space of at least 20,000 square feet from which the company can scale upwards, and which could possibly house as many as 1,000 persons over the next two years.
“I understand the concern for a lot of people would be, ‘Oh, you are just in a hotel, you could just pack up your bags and leave’ ... but let me assure them that we have incorporated a legal entity called Intellibus Jamaica. So, we are legally present here in this country,” Watal said.
President of Jampro Shullette Cox said said the agency did not have a long-standing relationship with Intellibus, but recently met with its team and was “exploring how together we can support the growth of Jamaica’s technology sector”.
Intellibus Jamaica LLC was registered on July 4, 2025, a search of Companies Office of Jamaica records shows.
After five months, 80 persons were admitted into the AI academy, with 50 of them graduating and placed in jobs, Watal said.
Intellibus initially conducted a hackathon in March this year to hire 20 persons, and plans to do a second version of the event, but this time with the intent of more than doubling the recruits.
“Our goal was to find people that we could hire right away … to find an intake for our AI academy, because we knew that there is raw potential from just talking to students at UTech and UWI,” Watal said.
“This time we want to go bigger. We want to get at least a thousand people in the room and, potentially higher, not just 20 like we did the last time, but up to 50 people right out of the hackathon. This is all subject to them being interviewed and qualifying. We feel very confident that if we can find the right talent, at least a thousand jobs can be created in the next one to two years,” he said.
He declined to disclose the level of investment made in Jamaica by Intellibus.
While the recruitment of Jamaicans in the tech sector seems promising to onlookers, some players aren’t convinced the jobs will last, given the fast pace of change in artificial technology and the tech space in general.
Geoff Waddington, CEO of RealDecoy Inc, expressed caution about expecting huge benefits from the tech space at this time.
“There are some major shifts happening globally in the tech sector, but based on the current trajectory, Jamaica will have some significant challenges growing in any of them,” Waddington told the Financial Gleaner.
“The reality is that both the public and private sectors underinvest in security, and what is spent on software and services largely goes directly or indirectly to overseas firms, leaving little opportunity domestically to grow this capability. There are some success stories to highlight, but when you look at it more broadly across all the different digital technology areas, there are some serious obstacles for Jamaica to overcome,” Waddington said.
RealDecoy is a tech support and data engineering firm headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, but also operates out of Jamaica.