IT-developer Platform Aciety Sees Steady Rooting in the Baltics

Well established companies, startups, and enormous corporations all share the unquenchable need for IT developers, which has led to an significant demand for platforms that provide dynamic services for outsourcing IT development. While IT means mingling with computers, it’s by no means entirely done by machines; the main operators are human, and as we all know it, humans tend to make mistakes.

Aismantas Bulanavičius, the co-founder and product manager of Lithuanian startup Aciety, is well familiar with the topic. His experiences in outsourcing product management through freelance job portals Elance and Odesk brought him nothing but disappointment in the form of incompetence and unreliability.

While it would be harsh to bash Elance’s and Odesk’s services based on one rotten feedback, it’s worth noting that history has shown us already how a single bad customer experience can lead into the birth of unmatched competition (think about Netflix for example), which in this case is – though maybe not in this particular scale – Aciety.

Aciety isn’t specifically competing with no-boundaries freelance job portals, however, their range of customers are partly shared. The Aciety platform focuses on meeting the ends between IT developers and companies, much like a b2b catalogue where service performance is tracked to help users sort out the best men for the job.

Aciety first pioneered in Lithuanian crowdfunding – they developed a financial derivative convertible loan agreement (CLA) and executed a personal crowd-funding campaign in which they raised more than €40,000 in seed funding from 35 crowd-investors. They officially launched on the 11th of April, 2014, and currently have an IT developer database which comprises 314 developers from 22 companies, mainly from Lithuania.

In all it’s simplicity, the platform offers two things; an alternative sales channel for suppliers, which would be SME IT agencies, whereas for customers Aciety is an easy route to outsource any projects that require IT know-how. In addition, customers can earn from leads they submit to the database.

The quality of the platform is ensured through careful selection of IT service providers based on clients, recommendations, portfolios, specializations, revenues per employee and code QA. Aciety is also working on increasing amounts of tangible performance metrics for tracking.

With nice buzz going on in the Baltics, the company’s future is still broad. They’re looking for IT companies, which need developers and sales partners like outsourcing agencies, while they’re also after an additional 30k EUR seed to brush up the success cases and prepare the proven scalable model to achieve Venture funding within 9-12 months.

Aciety is running on freemium for now, so if you’re a IT developer hungry for work or a company in need of mentioned IT guys, you’ll know where to go.