Gigster Brand Guidelines: A 2015 Y Combinator Dev Shop, Ionic Partners & Virtasant

A development shop, not a marketplace.

Gigster is a software-development service that puts together teams of freelance engineers, designers and project managers to build software for its clients. It was started in San Francisco by Roger Dickey and Debo Olaosebikan, and it went through Y Combinator’s Summer 2015 batch, according to the accelerator’s own company directory. TechCrunch covered its public launch on 22 July 2015, describing it as a full-service development shop rather than a marketplace in which buyers have to find and manage the talent themselves.

The idea grew out of Dickey’s own experience, TechCrunch reported. He had built Facebook apps with his company Curiosoft, sold that business to Zynga in 2008 and worked on the game Mafia Wars there before leaving in 2011. Trying out a string of product ideas afterwards, he found outsourcing development hard: on open freelance marketplaces such as oDesk and Elance, which later became Upwork, he and Olaosebikan received widely different bids for the same project, and the buyer still had to manage the developers from start to finish.

Gigster’s answer, as TechCrunch described it in 2015, was to take the management off the client’s hands. A buyer chatted with a sales engineer, described the product and received a fixed quote and timeline, the article said. Gigster then assigned a project manager as the single point of contact, together with one or more engineers and a UX and interface designer, and sent the client weekly status reports. After delivery it offered to maintain the code and add features. The magazine reported that only 7.7 percent of the freelancers who applied to work through Gigster were accepted, and that the service specialised in engineering rather than design.

The company raised a Series A round in December 2015, led by Andreessen Horowitz, according to a note added to the same TechCrunch article.

From start-up apps to enterprise projects.

Two years after launch, Gigster changed its target customer. In an article of 29 August 2017, TechCrunch reported that the company was moving away from letting anyone outsource app development and towards building technology projects for large companies, covering areas such as machine learning, data visualisation, blockchain, and React or Swift work. Gigster would assemble a squad of freelancers and guarantee the work at a fixed price, the article said. The shift came with a Series B round led by Redpoint, joined by Andreessen Horowitz as an existing investor.

The same article reported that Gigster then worked with more than 1,000 freelancers, and that they could earn bonuses through a “Gigster Fund,” which paid them part of the returns when projects it invested in were sold or listed. Dickey told the magazine that the company was thinking of moving towards a software-as-a-service model, selling some software products on top of its development services. TechCrunch described Gigster’s pitch as a combination of freelance talent, project-management tools and automation, set against freelance marketplaces where clients manage projects themselves.

Today the company’s website describes three ways of working with it. In Fully Managed engagements Gigster says it takes ownership of the whole development process; Dedicated Teams are groups assigned to a client’s projects; and Talent On Demand adds individual specialists to a client’s existing team. The website says its network holds more than 50,000 vetted developers, designers and product experts, and that it matches people to projects using success factors drawn from more than 1,000 engagements. It groups its work under artificial intelligence; innovation, design and UX; applications and platforms; and system modernisation, and it offers a short quiz on how ready an organisation is to adopt AI.

The members of the network are called “Gigsters” on the company’s pages, a name that runs from the launch coverage to the current site. Its about page sets out values such as “Network First,” “Be a Builder” and “Talent Has No Boundaries,” and frames remote, project-based work as the future of work. The company’s website loads the Poppins and Outfit type families for its pages.

Talent networks and how they present themselves.

Tech-talent networks and developer marketplaces sell access to people, so their identities lean on a few recurring ideas: the size of a pool, the reach of a map and the rigour of a test. Andela says its network speaks more than 300 languages and that more than 650 organisations have built with it; Turing’s website counts more than 5 million domain experts. Such figures are the companies’ own, and they move quickly: in December 2021 Turing told TechCrunch it had 1 million engineers and developers, and in March 2025 it said it worked with some 4 million coders.

Vetting usually gets a name of its own. Turing called its platform the “Talent Cloud,” and Andela later launched the Andela Talent Cloud. English Wikipedia describes Andela’s technical, soft-skills and leadership assessments feeding a “match fitness score,” and Andela has bought assessment and practice tools such as Qualified and Codewars, which it presents as a source of behavioural data from millions of developers.

The matching itself tends to be described as a sequence. TechCrunch wrote in 2021 that Turing used AI to source, evaluate, hire, onboard and then manage engineers remotely, and in the same year described Andela as evaluating technical and soft skills before matching engineers with the teams they fitted most closely.

Corporate pages put founders, investors and milestones up front. Andela’s about page runs a dated timeline of funding rounds, cohorts and acquisitions, illustrated with photographs of its own events, and introduces its leadership team; Turing’s company page lists its two co-founders by title. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company, separating dated reporting from what the company says about itself.

From Silicon Valley start-up to an Austin-run business.

Gigster has changed hands twice. English Wikipedia says that on 26 May 2021 the company announced its acquisition by Ionic Partners, an Austin, Texas, firm that buys and operates enterprise software businesses. By late 2023 the trade publication Staffing Industry Analysts was describing Gigster LLC as an Austin-based firm that assembles virtual software-development teams.

Under Ionic, Gigster made an acquisition of its own. Staffing Industry Analysts reported on 1 November 2023 that it had bought CodersRank, a platform based in Debrecen, Hungary, that ranks software developers by their skills. The deal had been announced in September 2023, its terms were not made public, and the plan was for the CodersRank brand to remain, the publication said. Gigster’s own blog post of 20 September 2023 said the combination would widen its development services to more than 250 technologies and bring a system for showing developers’ skills drawn from coding platforms and repositories.

English Wikipedia says that in March 2024 Ionic Partners sold Gigster to Virtasant, a cloud-optimisation services company, and it lists Virtasant as the owner. Gigster continues to trade under its own name: its website carries a Gigster LLC copyright line and its blog was still publishing new articles in August 2026, on subjects such as how companies deliver AI projects.

Gigster began with a promise, in the 2015 launch coverage, to build an app for anyone with an idea. As it moved to enterprise clients and then into a cloud-services group, its website came to be organised around engagement models, guaranteed outcomes and the size of its talent network, while keeping the Gigster name and the “Gigsters” label for its members.

For a design guide, Gigster shows how a service brand can keep a playful name while its audience shifts from founders to large companies, by keeping the name and the members’ title constant. Compare Upwork, the marketplace model Gigster was set against, and Toptal, another vetted talent network. For this guide we use ink blue, harbour blue and coral with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Gigster’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.