I started Brave Orbit after getting more involved in the world of startups and business. After leaving my comfortable job as a programmer and individual contributor, I’d started to get experience with leading technical teams, pitching projects to clients, product management - I was hooked.
I am a generalist and being in the fast paced world of startups suited me better than just coding.
I realised that I could start my own software agency, it required no capital and could grow organically. What appealed to me about having my own company was having the ability to choose which projects we worked on - I prefer working on projects that change the world for the better.
One of the aspects which lead to me choosing to become a software developer initially was an internship I had done at a South African NPO which advocated for Zimbabwean refugee rights, it was during this internship and seeing how wonderful but also inefficient the organisation was that made me want to use technology to accelerate businesses and organisations that weren’t solely profit oriented, whose mission mattered to me.
Brave Orbit was founded mid 2019, the mission of the company was to build software for organisations that were impact oriented. Brave Orbit was also largely modelled off the contributions I could make as an individual, we were wholistic in our approach - we assisted with technical consulting, design, product strategy, tooling a small business with a wealth of knowledge of existing SAAS solutions and integration between them.
Growing
At the end of 2019, Brave Orbit secured its first major client, a grocery delivery service which enabled me to grow the team and to hire one other full time developer. Vinay Kudari, Vinay was working at Accenture at the time and has since moved on to AWS, Apple and Gap in California.
The grocery delivery service, delivered groceries to South Africas poorest and riskiest regions to fulfil - townships. We were contracted to build a custom stock management system and to integrate their ordering website so that inventory and delivery were more of a seamless experience.
Then COVID hit, the systems we were developing were critical as their business grew exponentially. The South African government started to rely on their delivery networks and the growth was enormous.
We hired three part-time senior developer contractors to assist Vinay and I with the rapidly developing requirements to keep their systems operational. In less than a week we built a sophisticated stock replacement engine to handle the crumbling supply side of their business due to the impact of Covid-19.
The system also dynamically regenerated invoices and packing slips in response to supplier fulfilment changes. Our team helped do rapid software iterations and were heavily relied on during this troubling time of extreme growth and uncertainty.
By mid-2020, Brave Orbit had established itself, has a number of clients and grew to include Galia Davimes as Operations & Product Manager in June 2020. We signed a number of health-tech oriented companies during this time, I believe in part due to the increased needs of the organisations that were growing as a result of the impact that Covid-19 had on the health ecosystem.
At its peak in March 2021, Brave Orbit maintained a diverse team structure consisting of:
6 full-time developers, over 15 contractors with substantial involvement and numerous others with less than 5 hours of deliverables per week.
We also had a leadership team which consisted of Galia Davimes and I managing both technical and business operations. I was responsible for technical and engineering management, product strategy, sales and financial management of the business. Galia led account management, product management and operations.
