Est. 2014 · Austin, Texas

We're the team you'd hire if you could.

Ivate Solutions is 87 engineers, designers, and strategists with one rule: we only take work we'd be proud to put our name on. No B-team, no offshore handoffs, no surprises.

Our story

A consultancy that wishes it didn't have to exist.

Ivate Solutions started in 2014 when our founders — three former staff engineers at a payments unicorn — got tired of watching client teams drown in well-meaning advice that no one stuck around to implement. We figured the right move was to embed, ship, and leave the system in better shape than we found it.

Twelve years later, we've grown from 3 people in a converted Austin warehouse to 87 across three offices. The bar we set in year one hasn't moved: every engagement is staffed with senior practitioners, and we won't take a project if we can't put the right people on it.

The name? Innovate. Activate. Elevate. — three things our work has to do, in that order. Innovation without activation is theater. Activation without elevation just leaves your team holding a bag of new tech.

What we believe

Six principles, written down so we can be held to them.

01

Senior or nothing.

Every consultant on your account has shipped the kind of system we're proposing. We don't farm out junior labor and bill it as expertise.

02

Outcomes, not artifacts.

A 200-page strategy doc is a failure mode. We measure ourselves on what's in production at the end of the engagement.

03

Transfer the knowledge.

Every Ivate pod includes a pairing rotation with your engineers. If we leave and your team can't operate the system, we did the job wrong.

04

Boring is a feature.

We pick the proven tool over the novel one nine times out of ten. Your roadmap shouldn't be a graveyard of half-evaluated frameworks.

05

Say the hard thing.

If your architecture is the wrong answer, we say so on day one — not on month six when we've burned through the budget.

06

No vendor lock-in. Including ours.

We're allergic to retainers that hide rotting work. Engagements have defined endings. You can fire us in writing with two weeks' notice.

Leadership

People you'll actually meet in week one.

Every engagement is sponsored by a member of our leadership team. They sit in your standups when it matters, and you have their cell phone for the duration.

Marcus Chen

Marcus Chen

Co-founder & CEO

Previously staff engineer at Stripe and an early hire at Twilio's billing platform. Marcus runs the business so the engineers don't have to.

Priya Sharma

Priya Sharma

Co-founder & CTO

15 years across distributed systems — AWS Lambda team alum, ex-Cloudflare. Priya owns our technical bar and authors our quarterly architecture review.

David Okonkwo

David Okonkwo

VP of Engineering

Built and ran the platform team at a regulated fintech through their IPO. David sponsors our cloud and platform engagements.

Sarah Lindqvist

Sarah Lindqvist

VP of Strategy

Former McKinsey partner who left to build, not bill. Sarah runs discovery and is the person clients tend to call first when something's hard to articulate.

James Hartley

James Hartley

VP of AI & Data

PhD in applied ML, ex-DeepMind research engineer. James owns our AI safety reviews and our model evaluation methodology.

Elena Vasquez

Elena Vasquez

Chief People Officer

20 years building engineering cultures, most recently at GitLab. Elena keeps the bar high on hiring and the bar low on bureaucracy.

Milestones

A short history.

  1. 2014

    Founded in Austin

    Marcus, Priya, and Jordan (now an advisor) start Ivate Solutions out of a converted warehouse on East 6th Street.

  2. 2017

    First Fortune 500 engagement

    A nine-month re-platforming for a top-20 US bank. Still our largest single deployment to date.

  3. 2019

    Seattle & New York offices open

    First expansion beyond Texas. Headcount crosses 30.

  4. 2023

    AI & Data practice launched

    James Hartley joins from DeepMind to lead a new practice focused on safe, evaluated production AI.

  5. 2026

    Inc. 5000 & 87 team members

    Recognized as one of the fastest-growing privately held companies in the US.

Curious whether we'd be a fit?

Discovery calls are free, scoped to 30 minutes, and held with a senior engineer. We'll tell you honestly if your problem is one we can help with.

Schedule a call