Somewhere right now, a developer is typing very_good create into a terminal, and a fully-architected, test-covered app skeleton appears in seconds. That tool was written by a company whose mascot is a unicorn wearing sunglasses. The unicorn is not ironic. Very Good Ventures has been quietly underwriting the boring, load-bearing parts of cross-platform app development since before most people had heard the word "Flutter."
It is a fully remote consultancy of around 120 people, scattered across time zones, that enterprises call when they want one app to run beautifully on iPhone, Android, web, and desktop without building it four times. They are, by their own and the market's account, the first Flutter agency in the world. The claim is unusual mostly because nobody has bothered to dispute it.
One codebase. Every device. The rest is just stubbornness.- The VGV thesis, abbreviated
The problem they saw
Building the same app three times
For most of mobile's history, shipping to iPhone and Android meant maintaining two separate codebases in two languages, written by two teams who occasionally agreed on what the button should do. Add a web version and a desktop client and you had four front-ends drifting slowly out of sync, each with its own bugs and its own release calendar. The industry mostly accepted this as the weather - unpleasant, expensive, not really anyone's fault.
Very Good Ventures did not accept it as the weather. In 2017, working at a previous agency, the founding team got an early look at an unreleased Google framework called Flutter that promised a single codebase compiling to every platform. Most people heard "early-stage Google project" and reasonably kept their distance. A reasonable person would have waited for version 2.0.
The founders' bet
A Broadway app and a leap of faith
In 2018, founder David DeRemer incorporated Very Good Ventures - on April 1st, a date the company seems to enjoy more than its investors initially did - to keep developing that Hamilton app and to chase whatever Flutter might become. The bet was specific and large: not that Flutter would be useful, but that an entire consulting business could be staked on it before the framework had proven itself.
The team didn't just build apps with the tool. They built the first public Flutter apps for desktop and web, contributing to the edges of what the framework could even do. The unicorn mascot, for the record, is a joke about the startup term for a billion-dollar company - the kind of self-aware confidence that ages well only if you're right.
They incorporated on April Fools' Day to bet a business on an unreleased framework. The joke kept compounding.- On the founding of VGV
DeRemer's wager had a quiet logic. If Flutter won, the first serious agency in the space would own the reputation, the talent pipeline, and the tooling. Being early is only embarrassing until it isn't.
The milestone reel
Eight years, abridged. The unicorn grows up.
Founding team builds the first commercial Flutter app - for Hamilton: The Musical - while Flutter is still pre-release.
David DeRemer incorporates Very Good Ventures, the world's first dedicated Flutter agency.
Ships first public Flutter apps for desktop and web; Google taps VGV to build flagship Flutter products.
Raises $3M Series A from Celesta Capital; open-sources Dart Frog backend framework.
Extends Series A by $3.4M (total $6.4M) and acquires partner CreateThrive to become the largest Flutter consultancy.
Marks eight years as a Flutter agency, now folding AI integration into its single-codebase practice.
The product
Not just apps - the tools to build them
A consultancy is only as good as its last engagement, which is a precarious way to live. VGV's answer was to bottle its own best practices into open source. Very Good CLI scaffolds a Dart or Flutter project with architecture, testing, and CI already wired in - the difference between starting clean and starting correctly. Dart Frog, a minimalist backend framework, lets teams write their server in the same language as their app, so the front-end and back-end stop speaking different dialects.
Both are free. Both are used by developers who have never paid VGV a cent and may never know who maintains them. That is the strategy, not an accident of generosity: when you write the tools an ecosystem runs on, you become the obvious phone call when the ecosystem needs serious work done.
Give away the tools the whole field depends on, and you never have to introduce yourself.- The open-source flywheel
The proof
When Google needs a Flutter app, it calls them
The most persuasive line on VGV's resume is awkward to say without sounding like a boast, so here it is plainly: Google, which makes Flutter, has trusted Very Good Ventures to build and launch some of Google's own flagship Flutter apps - including the Flutter Gallery and the Google I/O conference app, plus tooling around the SDK itself. The people who invented the framework outsourced building with it to the people who got there first.
Beyond Google, the client roster reads like an airport departures board crossed with a stock ticker: Toyota, American Airlines, Dow Jones, The New York Times, Nubank, Universal Destinations & Experiences, JSX. Betterment, the robo-advisor managing north of $56 billion, rebuilt its app in Flutter with VGV. Somewhere in there, the team designed a NASCAR VIP fan experience - software shipped, more or less, at 200 miles per hour.
The numbers behind the unicorn
Selected figures, public sources. Bars scaled for legibility, not to a single axis.
Cash-flow positive, with reported revenue growth of ~235% over two years. Estimated annual revenue ~$25.8M.
The mission
Production-ready, not just possible
VGV's stated mission is to help mid-market and enterprise brands build scalable, beautiful, production-ready apps from a single codebase. The operative phrase is "production-ready." Anyone can get a demo working; the gap between a demo and something a Fortune 500 will trust with millions of users is where most cross-platform dreams quietly die. VGV's entire business is closing that gap, repeatedly, on deadline.
The 2023 acquisition of longtime partner CreateThrive was about scale - combining two teams into the largest Flutter consultancy in the world - but also about insurance. The bigger the bench, the more enterprises can stop worrying that their single-codebase bet rests on a boutique that might get acquired or distracted. VGV's pitch is partly that it is too established to disappear.
The hard part was never making Flutter work. It was making it work at 9am Monday for ten million users who don't care how it's built.- The production-ready problem
Why it matters tomorrow
The next bet is AI on top
Eight years in, VGV is doing the thing it did in 2017 again: leaning into the next uncertain wave before the consensus forms. This time it's AI - folding LLM-powered features and AI product strategy into the single-codebase practice. The pattern is consistent. Find the technology everyone agrees is interesting but nobody has operationalized, then become the team that operationalizes it. Their tech stack already lists Anthropic Claude and ChatGPT alongside Flutter and Dart, which is less a press release and more a tell.
The skeptic's question is fair: is a Flutter agency just a bet on Flutter, and what happens if the framework's moment passes? VGV's answer is structural. They never really sold Flutter. They sold the discipline of shipping one excellent product to every screen at once - and that problem isn't going anywhere, whatever the framework is called next.
So return to that developer at the terminal. The skeleton has finished generating. The tests already pass. Somewhere upstream of that small moment of relief is a company that decided, on April Fools' Day in 2018, that building the same app four times was a problem worth a whole business. The unicorn is still wearing sunglasses. It has earned them.