Terminal Buys Miami AI Startup Stationed and Builds a New AI Division Out of Wynwood

MIAMI — One of the people who helped turn Miami into a gathering place for builders now has a company-sized platform to keep doing it. Terminal, a global engineering company, has acquired Stationed, a Miami AI startup founded by Miami Hack Week creator Ja’dan Johnson, and is using it as the foundation of a new division called Terminal AI, Refresh Miami reported on Oct. 22.

The financial terms were not disclosed in the report. What was disclosed matters more for the local job market: Terminal AI has roughly 10 employees, another 10 positions are open, and Johnson said the company is actively recruiting engineers in Miami to work out of its Wynwood office.

Who Is Buying

Terminal was founded in 2017. According to Refresh Miami, it was co-founded by Joe Lonsdale, who also co-founded Palantir and the venture firm 8VC; Jack Abraham, founder of the startup studio Atomic; and Dylan Serota, Terminal’s CEO. The company built its business around recruiting and managing engineering talent around the world.

That infrastructure is a big part of why the deal happened. Stationed brought technical know-how and relationships with business executives. Terminal brought an established system for finding and managing engineers at scale. The two sides decided to combine after about a month of conversations and collaboration, according to the report.

What Terminal AI Will Do

The new division is aimed at a problem a lot of business owners will recognize. Plenty of companies know they should be doing something with artificial intelligence. Fewer know what that something is.

Terminal AI’s answer is to skip the slide decks. Instead of advising companies on what AI might do, it plans to send engineers into organizations to build working systems. These “forward-deployed engineers” will work alongside company leaders to find opportunities, automate processes and plug AI agents into day-to-day operations.

Johnson will lead the division and oversee the engineers doing that work. “I’m excited to keep doing this work,” he told Refresh Miami, “and being able to do it at scale.”

The target customer is the midmarket: companies too big to run on a founder’s spreadsheet but too small to have an in-house AI research team. Johnson believes that group has gotten relatively little attention in the broader enterprise AI conversation, according to the report.

How Stationed Got Here

Stationed grew out of the same instinct that powered Miami Hack Week. Johnson, who is originally from Jamaica, spent years organizing developer events before moving to South Florida. Miami Hack Week went on to draw thousands of technologists and entrepreneurs and attracted support from investors and companies including Atomic, Founders Fund and SoftBank, Refresh Miami reported.

As AI tools improved, Johnson kept hearing from executives who wanted to understand them but did not know where to start. He began running workshops to introduce business leaders to new AI tools. At the same time, he was quietly building Stationed, which had already deployed AI agents for companies in several industries before the acquisition.

Those workshops did double duty. They educated local business leaders, and they built the relationships that a services business depends on. When Johnson met Terminal’s leadership, including Serota, the fit was clear: one side had the client relationships and hands-on AI experience, and the other had the machinery to hire and manage engineers.

Why It Matters for Miami

Miami’s startup scene has spent the last few years proving it can attract founders and investors. The harder test is whether it can keep and grow technical teams. A division that plans to double its headcount and is hiring engineers to sit in Wynwood is a small but concrete answer.

There is also a lesson for founders in how the deal came together. Stationed did not start with a pitch deck aimed at venture capital. It started with community events, then workshops, then paid deployments. By the time a larger company came calling, Stationed had real customers and a track record. For a services-heavy AI business, which can be hard to scale on its own, joining a company with global hiring infrastructure solved the growth problem directly.

What Miami Business Owners Can Take From It

For local midmarket companies, the news is a signal that hands-on AI implementation help is becoming a product category of its own, not just a consulting add-on. Before signing with any provider, owners can ask a few practical questions:

• What process are we fixing? The forward-deployed model works best when there is a specific, repetitive task to automate, such as reconciling invoices, routing customer requests or summarizing reports.
• Who owns the system afterward? Ask whether your team will be trained to maintain what gets built, or whether you will depend on the vendor.
• How will we measure it? Agree on a before-and-after number, like hours saved per week or response time, before work starts.

For engineers, the takeaway is simpler: there are about 10 open roles at a growing AI team in Wynwood, and its leader says hiring will continue. “We’re going to keep hiring,” Johnson told Refresh Miami.

As more companies move AI from experiments into everyday work, Miami now has one more local team whose whole job is making that happen.

Source: Refresh Miami.