NearForm is 10!

Back in 2011, Cian Ó Maidín and Richard Rodger came together with a desire to make cloud computing accessible to organisations. At the time, the open source environment Node.js was only two years old, and was considered a bold & alternative approach to development.

By 20 December of that year, NearForm was registered as a company, and just like that we began our journey of providing business across the globe with not only game-changing digital products, but also with the processes and skills needed to maintain the efficiencies brought on by digitalisation.

In our early days, what Node.js presented was an opportunity for us to offer rapid delivery, enabling NearForm to secure the Sunday Business Post as our first ever client, rebuilding their e-commerce and mobile news experience.

By mid 2012, we established Ireland’s first and only Node.js Developer Meetup in Dublin, as well as NodeConf, a place for Node.js experts across the globe to come and collaborate while discussing new developments. To this day, NodeConf has remained a fixture in the Node.js community.

Despite these exciting milestones, NearForm’s first few years were an uphill battle, with most companies reluctant to make the leap to Open Source.

By mid 2013, the benefits of Open Source and Node.js were beginning to be well known as well as our status as experts in Open Source, and as the small NearForm team settled into an operating rhythm we began to secure larger partnerships, with Condé Nast being our first major international client, followed by the likes of NY Times, New York Magazine and the Ambassador Theatre Group in London.

As we continued to expand in the US, we were honoured to be one of the first companies to host a workshop in the new World Trade Center.

By 2019, we had established over 20 project teams, with a team of over 100 serving a portfolio of over 250 market-leading clients. At the start of 2020, US-based private-equity house Columbia Capital announced a strategic investment in NearForm to facilitate rapid growth and international expansion while accelerating research and development. NearForm’s DNA remains embedded in full-stack web platforms; with this investment enabling us to reach more clients to plug into the world of open source while spurring on even faster growth.

Shortly after, when the world as we knew it changed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we not only kept moving business as usual, but also played a truly phenomenal role in supporting the fight against the spread of COVID with the development of our digital contact tracing app, which went on to become the world’s most effectively deployed contact tracing app with over 1M downloads in 24 hours, and rollout in 9 jurisdictions.

Today, just over 10 years on from the day NearForm was registered, we are made up of a rapidly growing team of over 220 NearFormers.

In 2021 alone, we welcomed 119 new NearFormers. Despite this rapid growth, we remain grounded in the family values that we were founded on. Fundamentally, we don’t believe that people need to move to “tech hubs” to have a brilliant career. Instead, we bring a brilliant career to anywhere we find passionate and talented people.

Our greatest asset is our team of talented and dedicated NearFormers, to whom we owe our success. Fundamental to how we operate is our belief that our people should never have to choose between their career and their personal lives.

We have always been a remote-first company. Today, while our HQ remains in NearForm’s home town of Tramore just a stone's throw away from the beach, the majority of our team of over 220 work remotely, scattered across 29 countries, and working flexible hours.

Although we are widely dispersed, NearFormers are a tightly knit team. We trust one another and care about our colleagues, and embody our values of being open, empowering, flexible and bold in our everyday life as NearFormers.

While NearForm has come a long way from its roots as a team of two, what has remained constant over the past 10 years is our unwavering desire to empower our clients to succeed in a digital world, without compromising on our team’s quality of life and autonomy. Whether it be to change the face of kidney disease screening, enabling COVID contact tracing, or bringing banking to consumers’ fingertips, NearForm is here to ensure that the process of digitisation remains simple.

Learn more about our work over the past 10 years.

We are hiring! View our vacancies here.