Giraffe360 is a state-of-the-art service for real estate agencies. It captures nearly perfect imagery and creates 3D virtual tours and floor plans for every type of property. With main operations based in Riga, Latvia and London, UK, the scaleup combines cutting-edge hardware and software to make remote viewings as real as they can be. Established in 2016, Giraffe360 enjoys spectacular growth. It employs over 250 professionals. They make sure the innovative service is up-and-running in 28 countries.
ITIDO partners with Giraffe360 to enable the service’s further expansion in the US market via dedicated software development and team management. How did we become a trusted partner to a global scaleup? Here is the backstory.
The challenge
As with every successful product, growth comes with its own challenges. The Riga-based company is transitioning from a start-up with a validated MVP to having fully fleshed out customer-facing web applications. The latter are underpinned by a scalable, maintainable and feature-rich architecture. In 2021, work towards this new setup was underway, however, delays in development accumulated.
To manage their visual assets, property agencies and realtors use Giraffe360’s web interface. A new one is currently in the making. It would feature new user permissions, editing of assets (e.g. stills, panoramas), and superb UI/UX.
In the new platform, special focus is placed on the administration panel. It is meant for Giraffe360’s internal use by the customer care team. Currently, many customer support activities are either on paper, or within other systems and spreadsheets. So Giraffe360 needs to transition from scattered data to a streamlined system.
The role of ITIDO
As the customer base continues to grow, so does the need to manage end users in a smarter way. In 2021, ITIDO joined the Giraffe360’s efforts to help fast-track the new customer interface and administration panel. For this purpose, we built a fully functioning team of developers, technical lead and a delivery manager. With significant experience with Python and the Django framework, ITIDO’s backend engineers create countless API calls as well as microservice features in dedicated cloud containers.
As a company ITIDO is goal driven and custom solutions oriented. Communication and work organization is one of the company’s strengths.
Madars Opelts, Co-Founder, COO at Giraffe360
To serve the needs of product development, ITIDO’s backend team implements data analytics for the administration panel. It enables better understanding of how users behave and how Giraffe360 serves its clients. For example, the average time it takes Giraffe360 to process raw images can now be measured by the customer support agents thanks to our engineering efforts. Proper tests and documentation is how we ensure smooth development and releases in line with the industry’s best practices.
Based on ITIDO’s experience with product development for startups, we also help improve Giraffe360’s Scrum practice and clarify business requirements in sprint events. Last but not least, we proved again that fully remote collaboration with partners across the globe is possible and effective.
Technologies and processes we used
- Python (Django)
- Node JS
- Docker
- Bitbucket
- AWS (S3)
- Bastion
- Grafana
- Rabbitmq
- Postgres
- Dramatiq