David vs Goliath: Tiny Team Scores Big at the Computing Digital Technology Leaders Awards
We don’t normally shout about awards. We’d rather let the work speak for itself. But when a 14-person team from Devon gets shortlisted alongside some of the biggest names in UK technology, it feels worth mentioning.
Exe Squared has been shortlisted for two categories at the Computing Digital Technology Leaders Awards 2024: Digital Services Company of the Year and Digital Transformation of the Year — the latter alongside our long-standing partner Ad-MOTO for the Mobile Video Advertising Platform we built together.
David vs Goliath
The Digital Services Company of the Year category recognises outstanding companies delivering exceptional digital results. Looking at the other shortlisted companies, most have hundreds or thousands of employees. We have 14. Some have offices across multiple countries. We work from Exeter.
That’s not false modesty — it’s genuinely surprising. But it also reflects something we believe strongly: that a small, focused team of experienced developers can deliver work that competes with agencies ten times their size. We don’t have layers of project managers, account executives, and coordinators. Our clients talk directly to the people building their software.
The Ad-MOTO Platform
The Digital Transformation nomination is particularly meaningful because it recognises a project that genuinely transformed how a business operates. When we started working with Ad-MOTO, their advertising operations ran on spreadsheets, manual scheduling, and a lot of phone calls. The platform we built handles everything: campaign management, real-time fleet tracking, programmatic ad scheduling, audience measurement, and AI-powered analytics.
It’s not just automation for the sake of it. The platform enabled Ad-MOTO to scale from a handful of bikes to a fleet operating across London, serving campaigns for brands like Pepsi, Budweiser, and Channel 4. That’s a genuine business transformation.
Our Team
What makes this especially rewarding is the makeup of our team. We’ve got three Exeter University graduates, two career changers who came through IT Career Switch programmes, and six developers who started as apprentices through the Baltic and Estio training schemes. Two of those apprentices have since moved on to positions elsewhere — which we consider a success, not a loss. We’re proud to develop talent, even if we can’t keep everyone forever.
Founded in 2010, Exe Squared is co-directed by myself and Martin Allen. Between us, we bring decades of combined IT industry experience to every project. But the real credit goes to the team. Awards shortlistings don’t happen because of two directors — they happen because every person in the company cares about the quality of what they build.
What Happens Next
The awards ceremony takes place on 3rd July in London. Win or lose, it’s validation that a small team doing good work from the South West can compete at the highest level. And if we don’t win? We’ll be back at our desks the next morning, building software. That’s what we do.
