Toby Corey and the Santa Cruz Code of Reinvention
When Logicea announced its acquisition of Tuul Technologies this week, the headlines focused on what you’d expect: another major step in the global race to become AI-native. But beneath the press-release precision lies a distinctly Santa Cruz story—a story about the culture that built Tuul in the first place.
Toby Corey has always operated on the near horizon. Decades ago, with USWeb, he helped shape the early internet’s commercial fabric, translating the chaos of new technology into opportunity. With Tuul, he did it again—this time at the edge of a different frontier: agentic and contextual AI.
Tuul wasn’t born in a corporate lab. It emerged from a beach-town ecosystem where entrepreneurs build with community, humility, and restless curiosity. Around here, startups don’t just chase valuations; they chase what’s next. The same creative friction that powers our surf breaks—the pull of tide and terrain—also shapes how founders like Toby see the world: as something fluid, adaptive, and always in motion.
Toby Corey
That instinct met its moment. According to Time Magazine’s TIME 100 / AI, we’re entering what Satya Nadella calls Nadella’s Law: a doubling of AI performance every six months. That’s three times faster than the curve that defined Silicon Valley for half a century under Moore’s Law. The distance between idea and impact has collapsed. Agentic AI—systems that can reason, plan, and act—isn’t just improving productivity; it’s redefining it.
Tuul anticipated that acceleration. Its platform didn’t treat AI as a tool but as an orchestration fabric, binding data, logic, and human context into one intelligent system. The technology feels less like software and more in like intuition—an invisible layer that makes every digital interaction smarter, faster, and more human.
Logicea saw in Tuul not just IP, but a philosophy: that intelligence should be embedded everywhere, guiding enterprise systems the way a current guides the bay. Their acquisition joins Tuul’s adaptive architecture with Logicea’s global scale—spanning AI, cloud, and data analytics—to help enterprises worldwide move from digital transformation to digital fluency. It’s the difference between building technology and living with it.
And this is what defines the Santa Cruz entrepreneurial ethos. We build at the intersection of purpose and possibility. We test ideas in surf shops and coffee lines, then ship them to the world. We believe technology can expand empathy as much as efficiency. Toby’s work with Tuul reminds us that innovation isn’t only an act of invention; it’s an act of attention—seeing where the future is already forming and stepping toward it.
So yes, congratulations to Toby Corey and the Tuul Technologies team. But also, congratulations to the ecosystem that made it possible: the engineers, mentors, and dreamers who believe a global idea can start in a coastal town and ripple outward. In Santa Cruz, that’s not a surprise—it’s the pattern.
