Twelve Years of Redberry: From Four Friends in Tbilisi to a Laravel Premier Partner
Technical Content Writer
Redberry is twelve. What began in 2014 with four founders in Tbilisi now rests on two decisions taken along the way: specialise in Laravel, and take that expertise international.
That adds up to 300+ products shipped across the EU, UK, US and Middle East, around 200 people, and a place among the 13 Laravel Premier Partners worldwide. Here is how we got here, and who got us here.
Where did Redberry start?
Four friends founded Redberry in 2014 in Tbilisi. There was no plan involving Laravel partnerships, regulated fintech, or clients in four regions. The team was small, the market was local, and there was work to be won.
The first years went into becoming one of the biggest and best agencies in Georgia. We were named Agency of the Year twice, in 2019 and in 2021, and by then we were around 120 people, working with market leaders across most sectors of the Georgian economy. That was a comfortable place to stop.
What changed when we went all in on Laravel
We were never an agency that did everything. But deciding to go international meant stopping to look properly at what we were best at, and the answer kept coming back the same. Our strongest work was on Laravel, and the way the Laravel ecosystem thinks about building software already matched how we worked. So we went deeper instead of wider.
Going deeper cost us a large chunk of projects. Good work, in other stacks, that we would have taken a year earlier.
It also meant starting from zero abroad. In Georgia, our name opened doors. Outside it, nobody had heard of us, and nobody was looking for a Laravel partner in Tbilisi. Reputation came back one project at a time, and several of the early ones taught us things we would rather have learned cheaply.
“Focusing can be painful. You have to turn down work that is exciting, that you know your team would do well, and you have to keep turning it down long after the decision stops feeling clever. What we learned over twelve years is that focus is what actually moves a company forward.“
- Gaga Darsalia, CEO & Co-founder, Redberry
What do twelve years add up to
- 300+ products shipped for clients across the EU, the UK, the US and the Middle East
- ~200 people, ~ 100 in-house engineers
- One of only 13 Laravel Premier Partners worldwide, and an official Vue Partner, one of seven agencies globally
- #1 on Clutch's Top Laravel Developers, held continuously since 2023
- 150+ international awards across engineering, design and brand work
- 11 Bootcamp batches, 130+ engineers trained, and a large share of them still building with us
“What I care about most is how many of the same clients are still here, and how many people who came to us as beginners now lead the work. Some of our clients have been with us for over a decade. And the bootcamp graduates are now its mentors.“
- Levan Ketskhoveli, Managing Partner, Redberry
What we build now
We spent years working with the industry leaders in Georgia across almost every sector, which made us deliberately industry agnostic. We never set out to specialise by vertical. Over the years we found ourselves in one anyway: regulated environments.
That is where most of our work sits now. We build production systems for clients under the FCA, FINMA, SEC and DFSA, alongside enterprise platforms, ecommerce, gaming and leasing products. Laravel is the default backend across all of it, with Vue/Nuxt or React/Next on the front.
Over a third of our engagements start as rescue projects, where another team hit a dead end, and the client needs the system taken over and made reliable. Twelve years of shipping makes that work possible: you cannot rescue a codebase you haven't seen the failure modes of before.
How we give back
The ecosystem gave us a great deal before we had anything to give back. Most of what we do now is an attempt to even that out.
We have sponsored the major Laravel conferences since 2023: Laracon EU, Laracon US, Laravel Live UK and Laravel Live Denmark, with Laracon EU the longest-running at four consecutive years. We sponsor the projects the ecosystem actually runs on, including Pest and Filament. We build and maintain open source projects, most notably LarAgent, our AI agent framework for Laravel, and Mailbox for Laravel. And we run Laravel Meetup Georgia, the first Laravel meetup series in the country.
The Bootcamp is probably the achievement that matters most to us. It runs four months, full time, and it is free, because the point is to raise engineers rather than to sell a course. Participants learn Laravel and React the way we actually use them, on real projects, with our own engineers mentoring them. Batch 12 runs AI-assisted, the same way our teams work day to day.
Graduates who join us arrive already knowing how we build, and engineers from the earliest batches now mentor the current one. Applications for the 12th batch are open until September 27.
Thank you
None of the numbers above are ours alone. They belong to the clients who chose us, often over a bigger name closer to home, to everyone who has worked here across twelve years, and to the Laravel community, which we found generous from the first conference we walked into and have been part of ever since.
Year thirteen starts now, and the plan has not changed: keep going deeper, keep shipping.
If you are weighing up a Laravel partner for the next twelve years of your product, we would like to hear about it.
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Read moreAbout the author
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.