The Midnight Hour, Managed
Somewhere between 2am and 3am, when the on-call engineer at a major brand is staring at a red dashboard and the business has already lost a few thousand in revenue, Freddie Heygate's company picks up. That's not marketing copy. That's the job description. Just After Midnight exists for exactly that moment - and Freddie has spent the better part of a decade building the operation that makes it possible.
As CEO, North America at Just After Midnight, Freddie is now bringing that same infrastructure to US agencies and enterprise brands. He touched down in Austin, Texas in January 2024, trading Singapore's hawker centres for Texas barbecue - his third continent for the same company. JAM's founder Sam Booth reportedly marked the occasion with a blog post titled "The British Invasion." That's either corporate enthusiasm or an inside joke. Probably both.
"Building for scale: Serving your millionth customer the same experience as the first."
Freddie Heygate - Cloud Expo Asia Singapore, 2019Just After Midnight was founded in 2015 by Sam Booth and launched in November 2016 with £250,000 in seed funding. The pitch was simple: most digital agencies sell clients on beautiful websites and solid architecture, then disappear at 5pm. JAM stays. Around the clock. Across time zones. With full-stack specialists on four continents handling incidents before the client's morning standup even starts.
The company's client list reads like a who's who of brands with genuine digital stakes: Ford, Abbott, Vodafone, Valtech, VML, Grey. These are organisations where downtime isn't embarrassing - it's expensive. JAM's ISO 27001 certification and status as an AWS Advanced Consulting and Well-Architected Partner (with a Migration and Modernisation Competency) signal that they're not a glorified helpdesk. They're infrastructure partners.
Sam Booth met Freddie over a beer in Singapore. Freddie was already living there, working in digital, looking for the right opportunity. That beer became a five-year CEO tenure across Asia-Pacific.
The Career Behind the Title
Freddie's path to running continental operations for a cloud services firm wasn't exactly linear. He studied Film Production at the New York Film Academy - an institution better known for producing directors than cloud architects. Before JAM, he spent years in the UK's digital agency world: brand consultancy at Rosewood Advertising, then a progression through Reading Room from Digital Consultant to Head of Marketing. A stint as Head of Marketing at The Drum rounded out his agency-side education.
That background matters. Most managed services executives come from pure technical tracks. Freddie came from the agency world, which means he understands the commercial pressures and client relationship dynamics that make 24/7 support not just a technical requirement but a business one. When he talks to US agencies about JAM's offering, he's not selling from the outside. He's been on the other side of that conversation.
When the opportunity to join JAM as CEO, Asia came up in 2019, he was already in Singapore. The timing was right. The city-state's tech scene was booming, brands were scaling their digital infrastructure across Southeast Asia, and JAM needed someone who could build the regional operation from the ground up. Freddie took it on.
The Heineken AR Experiment That Worked
In 2019, Freddie's team in Singapore pulled off something that hadn't quite been done before in the country at scale: a web-based augmented reality campaign for Heineken, tied to their Formula 1 sponsorship. The AR "Cheers" experience triggered when users pointed their phone at a Heineken bottle - no native app required.
The technical problem was not trivial. Bar lighting is terrible. Bottles are glossy and reflective. Angle variation is massive. To make the image recognition work reliably across Singapore's nightlife venues, the team trained a model on over 200,000 variants of Heineken bottle images - different angles, different lighting conditions, different states of condensation. The campaign ran as one of Singapore's first nationally deployed web AR activations.
The Heineken AR Cheers Campaign - By the Numbers
- 200,000+ Heineken bottle image variants used to train the AR model
- Zero native app installs required - browser-based AR only
- Deployed across bar venues throughout Singapore for F1 sponsorship activation
- Optimised for low-light environments - because bars are dark
- One of Singapore's first nationally deployed web AR campaigns
That project captures something about how Freddie thinks. The interesting problem isn't the obvious one. It's not "can we build AR?" It's "can we make AR work when someone is holding a wet beer bottle in a dimly lit bar, slightly tipsy, after Singapore's 90% humidity has done its worst?" That's the version worth solving.
The Move to America
In January 2024, Freddie packed up Singapore and headed to Austin, Texas. JAM now operates in the US with full managed cloud capabilities - AWS, Azure, DevOps, SRE, incident management - for American agencies and the enterprise brands they serve. His mandate: build the North American book. Engage US agencies. Show them what it looks like when the support layer doesn't go home at 5pm.
The US market is a different beast. American enterprises are sophisticated buyers. They've seen every managed services pitch. The JAM angle - white-label support that agencies can offer under their own brand, backed by ISO 27001 certified operations and AWS partner credentials - cuts through some of that noise. Agencies can promise 24/7 SLAs to clients without hiring a global support team themselves. JAM is the team.
Freddie has spoken on these themes across a range of industry stages: DrupalCon, Cloud Expo Asia (twice), Meet Magento New York 2023, the British Chamber of Commerce Singapore, and various AWS webinars. His public speaking isn't the TED-style inspiration circuit. It's practitioner-level content for engineers and agency leaders who care about uptime, incident response times, and what AWS Migration Competency actually means in practice.
JAM Inside the Ultima Group
In March 2021, Just After Midnight was acquired by Ultima Business Solutions, joining a broader group of IT service providers. The acquisition gave JAM access to expanded resources while maintaining its distinct managed cloud and 24/7 support identity. For clients, the Ultima backing added another layer of institutional credibility. For Freddie, it meant operating within a larger structure while still driving the JAM-specific market expansion.
The company has stayed lean - around 51 people running 24/7 coverage across London, Australia, Singapore, and now the US. That headcount-to-coverage ratio is only possible with the kind of distributed, follow-the-sun model that Freddie has been building continent by continent.
The agency world runs on promises of uptime. Just After Midnight is the infrastructure that makes those promises true.
Just After Midnight - Company Positioning