About Us

Cortance is a team of like-minded professionals who work with startups and product development companies, prioritising quality, flexibility and deadlines. We help businesses expand by providing verified software engineers without the direct hiring responsibilities or financial burden, enabling them to speed up the development process, optimise and automate workflows using GenAI technologies, or maintain software in an up-to-date condition.

Idea

The idea for Cortance grew out of the COVID years. Demand for remote outstaff developers exploded almost overnight. Retail businesses, startups and product companies everywhere needed to scale engineering fast, and the supply side wasn't built for it. Agencies resold candidates without verification, added juniors to projects, businesses rushed to make fast decisions not to waste clients and adapt to the new reality, quality swung wildly from one placement to the next, and "fast" usually meant skipping steps rather than actual efficiency.

Yevhen Vavrykiv and Alex Korniienko were watching all of this from within the same industry, conducting dozens of presales together at their previous job: Yevhen handled the sales and engagement side, and Alex the technical side. Over their collaboration, running deal after deal right before and through that boom, they kept coming back to the same complaint. Their own industry sold "digital transformation" to other businesses while the hiring and supply flow in the IT sphere is still not convenient or transparent, and is just ancient.

Candidates resold between agencies, profiles that looked completely different depending on which company wrote them up and who sells them, long replies — all of these have embarrassed teammates every day. It was slow and inconvenient. Seemed everyone in the industry knew it and shrugged. Eventually the complaint and daily discussion of the situation turned into a plan to fix it themselves.

Finding a name and testing the idea

Picking a name took about two weeks, longer than either of them expected for something that sounds obvious once you have it. Core plus importance became Cortance. They bought the domain in 2022, put up a bare-bones landing page just to see if the idea held up outside their own heads, and got a first client not long after. That was enough to keep going. What they actually wanted was to standardise the whole hiring process: one standardised profile format, one vetting process, one contract, one developers delivery partner.

Challenges Cortance faced

Ecosystem development has started, a few more teammates are onboarded; the company runs. Then the war. A lot of early development and collaborations happened during the winter of blackouts, when missile strikes knocked out power across Ukraine for hours, sometimes days, at a time. We ran on EcoFlow batteries and whatever power setup we could patch together from the first week. None of our European clients felt a drop in delivery quality. A Western company had no obligation back then to keep betting on a Ukrainian vendor, so the only real option was to never give them a reason to reconsider. And we did it.

Cortance now

Cortance is now a marketplace of close to 700 verified software engineers, most of them in Ukraine, the rest spread across Poland, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and a handful of other countries. Every developer goes through the complex five-stage process: an application, an AI-assisted screening, an HR interview in English, a technical assessment with live coding for specialised roles, and a final profile review. About two in five make it through all five stages. Most of our experts have an average of six years of commercial experience and currently work with GenAI technologies, using tools like Claude Code, Codex, and GitHub Copilot to remain competitive in the market.

Our strength is also onboarding within 48 hours of the request, while other companies only deliver CVs by then.

Most of our clients are startups and product companies in the US and Europe who need to flex their engineering capacity without the cost and commitment of a full-time hire, and without recruiting fees, severance, or paying someone to sit on the bench between projects. Because we work with developers across several countries, a US company hiring at Cortance's rates typically saves around 40% compared to hiring the same seniority locally, and without giving up quality. If a client wants to bring someone onto their own payroll later, that's supported too. After six months of a successful engagement, the developer can transfer directly to the client.

Looking across our developers' project histories, most of the experience clusters around fintech, e-commerce, healthcare, AI, and travel and logistics, with a fair amount in retail, banking, and cybersecurity too. We also carry specialists most outstaffing shops simply don't have: quantitative developers, and engineers who know platforms like HubSpot, Umbraco, Pega, and Salesforce well enough to walk straight into an existing implementation.

We didn't start Cortance to build another CV database. We started it because we'd watched good developers and clients get mishandled by an industry that profits from being slow and opaque, and we were sure hiring could be verified, fast, flexible, and honest all at once. That's still the bar every request gets held to.