IT Labs sells the team behind the code.

The curious thing about IT Labs’ work with Notting Hill Genesis is where the relationship began: a podcast. Rajiv Peter, then the housing association’s director of digital technology, appeared on CTO Confessions. An interview became an introduction to a different kind of conversation. Eventually, there was software to build. For a company selling engineering expertise, asking someone about their work turned out to be a useful place to start.

In a 2022 account of the engagement, IT Labs described helping the housing association move to SharePoint Online and redesign a system for outgoing payments. Its scrum team analysed the requirement, designed a solution and delivered a minimum viable product, then developed it into a fuller system. This was ordinary organisational plumbing: getting money to customers and third parties. Ordinary plumbing, of course, becomes very interesting when you depend on it.

That example gets closer to IT Labs than a catalogue of programming languages does. The company supplies people who can turn a business requirement into working software. Its customer needs the capacity to build, test and maintain something, without having to construct every part of an engineering department first.

An engineering department, by arrangement

Founded in Los Angeles in 2005, IT Labs now describes a distributed operation spanning North America, Europe and South America. Its 2025 anniversary post credited three founders: Branislav Gjorcevski, Vladimir Ilievski and Ilija Mishov. The company’s stated ecosystem exceeds 700 people, a description that includes outside capacity. Treat that as a network, rather than a precise employee count. The distinction matters when you are buying the availability of particular skills.

The central offer is Team-as-a-Service. IT Labs assembles and supports a group around the customer’s needs; it can also supply individual specialists. The work stretches from custom web and mobile applications to architecture, cloud infrastructure, quality assurance and ongoing support. Its current company description also foregrounds AI strategy, data science, security and training. These are services commissioned for a customer’s circumstances, rather than a single software subscription anyone can activate.

Its public service definition describes two engagement routes: a dedicated agile team, or a project with an agreed scope, estimate and deliverables. That choice assigns different responsibilities. A team gives a client capacity to keep making decisions as the work evolves. A defined project demands more agreement about the destination before the journey begins. Either way, someone on the customer’s side still needs to know what success looks like.

Payments, platforms and organisational memory

The customer list makes sense through that lens. A housing organisation needs a payment workflow. A software business needs a product rebuilt. An established company needs an existing platform kept useful. IT Labs sits in the broad market for custom engineering and outsourced development, competing for work that could also go to an internal hiring programme, independent contractors or another software services firm.

Customer accounts on Clutch give the offer some texture. Image API’s CEO reported a SaaS launch 90 days ahead of the company’s estimate. Emergenetics described platform enhancements and maintenance, with a disclosed engagement range of $1 million to $9.999 million. Those are different assignments, but both reward continuity: people who remember why a system works the way it does.

The commercial proposition is therefore partly about organisational memory. Hiring a developer fills a vacancy. Keeping several disciplines working together can preserve decisions, assumptions and context across releases. That is the attraction of IT Labs’ positioning. It is also the question a prospective buyer should test: which people will stay on the work, and how will the next person learn what the previous person knew?

“They work as one of our internal departments, not like a vendor.”Steven Douglas · Emergenetics International
Client review, December 2023

A team still needs somewhere to belong

There is a nicely literal picture of teamwork in IT Labs’ anniversary photographs: colleagues lined up in front of a football goal. Its 2022 employer profile offers a more useful operational detail. It describes biweekly knowledge sessions, mentorship and a six-month upskilling programme, alongside an office amphitheatre used for shared learning. The company also lists English lessons and communication training. For a distributed supplier, explaining the work is part of doing it.

IT Labs calls its culture an idea meritocracy, with radical transparency among its stated principles. That is an aspiration a client can turn into a practical interview question. Ask who can challenge an estimate. Ask how a tester raises a concern. Ask what happens when the customer’s preferred solution creates extra risk. A room full of agreeable people can look efficient right up to the moment a hidden disagreement reaches production.

Price the handover, too

Clutch lists an indicative $50-$99 hourly rate and a $25,000 minimum project size. These are directory figures, rather than a quotation. One ticketing-platform reviewer also wanted contractors more involved in on-call support. That small observation exposes a large issue: delivery and responsibility do not automatically travel together.

A buyer can copy a straightforward habit from these examples. Begin with a bounded business problem. Agree how a first working version will be judged. Make production support, decision rights and knowledge transfer explicit before expanding the team. If the budget assumes occasional help while the business expects continuous ownership, even capable engineers will be working inside the wrong arrangement.

AI puts the hour under pressure

A more uncomfortable question hangs over this business model. In a June 2026 interview, co-founder and former CTO Ilija Mishov, by then advising through Tektopia, argued that AI and existing software tools reduce the hours a services company can sell. His answer was to put greater weight on quality and performance. It is his assessment, rather than an announced IT Labs pricing change, but it lands directly on the company’s market.

For a buyer, faster code generation makes the surrounding work more important to examine: requirements, review, integration and operation. IT Labs’ case rests on its ability to carry those responsibilities together. The test is concrete enough. Can this team understand your payment process, maintain your platform and answer for a release? That is a better purchasing question than how many lines of code it can produce before lunch.