Redberry on Laravel News at Laracon US 2026: Regulated Fintech, AI, and Why We Keep Coming Back
Technical Content Writer
At Laracon US 2026 in Boston, our CEO Gaga Darsalia sat down with Eric Barnes, founder of Laravel News, during a break in the day-one livestream. They talked about what Redberry is, why we keep sponsoring Laracon, the regulated-finance work at the center of what we build, and how AI has reopened a category everyone had written off: modernizing legacy PHP.
The interview ran on the Laravel News stream between the afternoon talks. It was short, but it covered most of what we care about as a company, so we pulled the highlights together here.
Who is Redberry?
Redberry is a software development agency based in Tbilisi, Georgia, and we have been building with Laravel for about 12 years. Today we are a team of around 200 people, running 25 to 30 projects in parallel for international clients. Roughly a third of that work comes from the US, another third from the UK, and the rest is spread across Europe and the Middle East. What ties it together is the kind of software we build: business-critical systems that companies run their operations on, not throwaway prototypes.
Why do we keep coming back to Laracon?
We keep coming back because Laracon is where Redberry grew up. The habit started long before we were ever a sponsor.
“Laracon really played a big role when we were a young agency. I remember times when we just used to gather at the office and watch the recordings of Laracon.“
- Gaga Darsalia, CEO, Redberry
These days that has turned into sponsoring the events we once watched from a meeting room: Laracon EU in Amsterdam, Laravel Live UK, Laracon US, and, for the first time this year, Laravel Live Denmark. The draw is still the community around it.
"The Laravel community is the most welcoming community, maybe across all the different communities in tech."
- Gaga Darsalia, CEO, Redberry
What does Redberry build?
We build business-critical enterprise software, most often for regulated industries, with finance at the core: fintech, payments, wealth management, and investment tech. Because our clients answer to different regulators, we work across several jurisdictions at once. We build for US wealth and investment-tech companies under the SEC, for UK clients under the FCA, and for Swiss clients under FINMA. Years of that work have taught us what regulators expect from the software itself, which is a different discipline from writing the features.
How is AI changing legacy modernization?
AI has turned legacy modernization from work people avoided into work they now ask us for. A lot of companies still run old, often non-framework PHP systems that were long considered too risky or expensive to touch.
"Those systems were for many years deemed unfeasible to modernize. But now with AI, people are starting to re-evaluate. It's become feasible to modernize those systems."
- Gaga Darsalia, CEO, Redberry
For us that means going in to audit an existing system, working out what is really inside it, and setting a strategy that runs from DevOps and infrastructure through the codebase, sometimes moving old non-framework PHP onto Laravel. And while AI gets its loudest applause for greenfield builds, we think the durable value sits elsewhere.
"Everybody is excited about the greenfield stuff, and AI now accelerates greenfield development maybe 10x. But legacy systems modernization, maintenance, continuous development, that has been our core focus for many years. That is also what is running businesses, what is running the economy."
- Gaga Darsalia, CEO, Redberry
Does the CEO still write code?
A little, and on purpose. Gaga has not shipped a commercial project in nine or ten years, but he still writes open-source and internal code, and he runs our software delivery operations alongside the engineering leads.
"On Slack I have the title 'CEO / Mid-level developer,' and I am always asking our engineering director when he is going to promote me to senior."
- Gaga Darsalia, CEO, Redberry
The joke has a point. He likes to stay hands-on with the operations he designs, so he still builds the occasional internal feature just to keep a firsthand feel for the developer experience our teams work in every day.
Watch the interview
You can watch the full conversation with Eric Barnes on the Laracon US 2026 day-one livestream. It is one of a series of break-time interviews Laravel News ran across the conference.
Being at Laracon US 2026 was part of a bigger year in the Laravel community for us. We are a Laravel Premier Partner, we sponsored the conference for the third year running, and back home we hosted the first official Laravel Meetup in Georgia. If you want to talk regulated-fintech builds or a legacy modernization project, that is exactly the conversation we come to these events to have. See you at the next one.
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Technical Content Writer at Redberry
Translates Engineering Work into Client-Facing Content
Keti leads editorial content at Redberry, writing and producing the company's technical articles, case studies and client interview series. Her work helps translate our team's first-hand engineering experience into helpful content for a global audience.