The Diginius co-founder has run his company's largest market remotely for years, and turning that into a real on-the-ground presence is now the priority.
Nate Burke has spent three decades in digital advertising, long enough to have worked through the industry before Google existed. Fifteen years ago he and his wife moved from the United States to London and founded Diginius, a technology and media platform built to help agencies and B2B companies manage an increasingly fragmented digital marketing landscape. Today the company employs around 50 people, roughly split between the UK and teams spread across ten other countries, with annual turnover in the five to ten million range.
Diginius's core business connects client data with advertising platforms, letting agencies run trading, bidding and recommendation engines from a single pool of information rather than juggling dozens of disconnected sources. The company built much of its early growth around agencies, and over the past year has begun standing up a direct-to-business arm aimed at mid-market and enterprise B2B companies. Its most visible relationship is with Microsoft's advertising business, where Diginius has become the largest global partner, supporting more than 1,200 agencies across 60 countries. Burke has said the choice to build deeply around Microsoft rather than Google came down to partnership philosophy rather than volume: Microsoft, as a distant second in advertising, had a stronger incentive to work closely with partners and a track record of longer-term commitments, compared with players who tend to use partnerships to gain share and then move on.
The challenge Burke is currently working through is less about product and more about geography. Diginius already has a presence in the US, its largest market, but has run most of that business remotely from London under UK legal structures rather than building a proper on-the-ground footprint there. Burke has pointed to communication style as one source of friction in that setup. He has described English colleagues as relying on a more nuanced, understated style of selling, while American buyers are used to a more direct and confident pitch, so an English-style delivery can undersell itself without anyone noticing. He has also described a tonal gap in day-to-day meetings: English staff can miss the cues that signal an American conversation is going poorly, something Burke, who grew up in the US, has had to step in and flag himself.
His own read, shaped by growing up in the American Midwest before decades of working from the UK, is that the rule of thumb in his experience is straightforward even if the execution isn't: a founder generally needs to live in a market to properly develop it, something Diginius has not yet done for the US despite having engineering leadership and other functions based there. At the same time, he has cautioned against rushing that move before a company's home market is solidly established, arguing that trying to break into the US too early tends to fail, and that the more reliable path is to lock down a strong domestic base first, sell into new markets remotely, and only then commit to a physical presence once real traction exists.
That is roughly the sequence Diginius is now following. The company is holding its first self-run conference in the UK this year, a step Burke has framed as part of building a solid domestic base before replicating the approach elsewhere. The US, along with newer teams in Spain and other markets, remains the next phase, with resourcing decisions about how and when to deepen that presence still being worked out rather than settled.