Made in Croatia

Croatian Software Developers Working for World's Largest Companies

By 22 October 2018

An impressive list of clients.

The Q Software company from Zagreb is the third fastest growing technology company in Central Europe according to recently-published Deloitte list, with an incredible growth of as much as 3,894 percent, which is the best placement of a Croatian company to date. Importantly, Q has never received any investment so its growth is even more impressive when compared with other companies on the list which have had large capital investments, reports Index.hr on October 22, 2018.

Q was founded five years ago by Filip Ljubić and Dalibor Jurgec. They already have an impressive list of clients, including The Times, BBC, Vaillant, Coca-Cola, Lufthansa, Hilti, Walmart, Facebook, Audi, Volkswagen, Visa, Pfizer, Nestle, US Postal Service, University of St. Gallen, Factory Berlin, IBM.

Today, the company operates in 20 countries and 100 percent of its revenues come from abroad. In addition to Ljubić and Jurgec, Vedran Tolić is also responsible for their success. He came to the company straight from the university and later became a co-owner. “When we started, it was a side job. Three years ago, Dalibor and I decided to focus on what we are doing now. We went to Dubai, where we found some customers and so it all started. We now have three partners in the firm – Dalibor, Vedran Tolić and me. Vedran, who is now a partner, was our first employee. He later bought a share in the company so now we have three co-owners,” said Ljubić.

They develop a variety of apps for clients from various industries – automotive, pharmaceutical, banking, media and civil engineering. “The apps we work on are those people use every day. For example, a company like Hilti comes to us and says, ‘We have a large internet portal which is aimed at both our customers and our employees, and something should be added, improved’ and we do it. Or we have another client like Volkswagen which has specific app requirements that will make it possible for their customers to take a photo of their cars and change the colour and the rims, and see how the car would look like in various versions.

We have done a job for the Vaillant boiler manufacturer for visitors who, when they come to their factory, can now view various info of tablets, such as factory history and the like. For Facebook, we have been working on an app for on-boarding new employees. When a new employee comes to the company, they did not want to give them a boring document about what the company culture is, but they wanted it to be fun, with games, movies and clips.

We worked for a large pharmaceutical company in Britain. We developed a system that monitors medicine delivery. Each medicine has a small tracking device which monitors the temperature while the medicine is being transported across Europe and the world. And then you can see the info: ‘The medicine was exposed to the sun at some point, the temperature was 37 degrees, and we need to get it off the shelves.’

For the BBC, we worked on an app to simulate the spread of a viral epidemic. We have even received an award for this. For the first time in the history of mankind, scientists were able to obtain aggregate data what would occur if a viral epidemic were to spread. We did the project for their show called Pandemic. 60,000 residents of Great Britain downloaded the app,” said Ljubić.

There are more than 100 people currently working on Q projects. Three years ago, there were only ten of them. Their clients are international firms, but their operations are based in Croatia. “International companies do not work with us because we are cheap, but because they cannot find the people we have. You cannot find these people easily in Zurich, Stockholm, Munich, London... There is a great lack of developers, and even if you find them, there is so much competition that they are very likely to leave very fast. We have very good projects, very good customers and we are therefore attractive for young developers. At present, we have about a hundred people working either as employees or as collaborators. We have about 20 people in the company who do have nothing to do with software but do finance, accounting, sales, marketing and so on. About 80 people work in the engineering department,” concluded Ljubić.

Translated from Index.hr.

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