Entrepreneur Endows Scholarship to Support Computing Students 'Who Need It the Most'
Christian Battaglia (CS 2017) has endowed a need-based scholarship in the College of Computing.
“I wanted to help students,” he said, “the ones who need it the most.”
Battaglia serves as VP of Engineering for Sysdyne, a cloud-native software platform for the construction materials industry – concrete, asphalt, gravel. He calls it “Sweaty SaaS.”
“It’s the ugly industries that are my bread and butter now.”
He has a long history of entrepreneurship. During a Georgia Tech study-abroad program in Barcelona, he crossed paths with Oscar Pierre (AE 2014), joining him on the ground floor of what became Glovo, now one of Europe’s largest delivery platforms.
Back in Atlanta, Battaglia joined a team for the Inventure Prize competition that served as the basis for FIXD, which makes a device that decodes check-engine lights for drivers. He helped launch the company, serving as a founding engineer.
He later co-founded Triple Axle, a routing platform for the specialty trucking industry, before joining Slabstack – a CRM and pricing platform for concrete, aggregate, and asphalt producers – as a founder and CTO. Sysdyne acquired Slabstack in December 2025.
When he was at Tech, Battaglia did “a little of everything” – lacrosse, Phi Delta Theta, a co-op at GTRI, study abroad in Barcelona. He started in 2012 and graduated in December 2017, having taken time along the way to work with startups and travel.
He says Tech’s emphasis on applied computing – not just computer science theory – prepared him well for a career spent building real products in unglamorous industries. “It’s about what you do with the skills, not the skills themselves,” he said. The scholarship, he adds, was always going to be for the College of Computing. “I just wanted to make sure it was going to the right place.”
“For me, it was like my playground,” he said. “I’m so thankful I got exposed to so many different things.”
