In 2011, serial entrepreneur Jeff White was looking for his next great idea. He’d already built and sold startups, including Blue Canopy and GovWin. He eventually decided on an event discovery platform and founded Gravy Analytics. The platform evolved into the world’s first location data verification engine, AdmitOne.

Gravy’s Software Engineering team originally built their platform using Java, a very popular programming language. As Gravy’s business grew, their platform experienced growing pains. Faced with increasing technical challenges, they turned to the Scala programming language, widely-used in big data engineering. While Scala wasn’t the trendiest language, it had a devoted fanbase, and it drove many of the world’s largest data processing systems.

Unfortunately, Scala is a rare, high-demand skill in the D.C. metro area, where Gravy is based. They had to compete with a few big companies for a limited pool of software engineers. Gravy determined they needed expert help to find qualified candidates in the region. They decided to work with hatch I.T., a boutique technical consulting firm, because of their experience helping local software startups scale engineering teams.