# About Koombea > Koombea was founded in Barranquilla in 2007 and has put more than 200 apps in market. We sell delivered scope priced in story points, not hours. Source: https://www.koombea.com/company/about/ --- Koombea was founded in Barranquilla, Colombia in 2007 and has put more than 200 apps in market since. Today the work ships through AI Pods: a scope you approve in story points, delivered in two-week cycles, at a price that does not move if we sized it wrong. ## Why the company is built this way We billed for time for most of the company's history, which means we know the arithmetic from the inside. When a vendor invoices hours, a project that runs long is not a bad outcome for the vendor. Nobody has to behave badly for that to hurt you. The incentive is in the contract before anyone shows up. So we took the meter out. A story point is delivered, tested functionality. We size the work, you approve the size, and the price holds even when the estimate turns out to be wrong. That commitment is only survivable because AI-First delivery cut the cost of being wrong far enough that we can carry it instead of you. ## Origins Koombea was founded in 2007 in the tropical city of Barranquilla, Colombia. Today we work from Barranquilla and from Naples, Florida, with a remote-ready team spread across many other places. Our name comes from a Colombian dance, the Cumbia, where participants move in short sprints, just like in a typical Agile app development project. The mark in our logo is the sombrero vueltiao. Neither is decoration. ### Where we work - Barranquilla, Colombia: The delivery center, and where the company started - Naples, Florida: 3811 Airport Road N, Suite 100A ## What you can check yourself More than 200 apps in market since 2007. Google, Motorola Solutions, Facebook, and Skype have acquired some of them. Our software design and development unit holds a CMMI-DEV/3 appraisal, which is an outside assessment of how we run delivery rather than a description we wrote ourselves. Client reviews sit on Clutch, where we did not choose the questions. The numbers our clients published are the ones worth reading. Paymentez went from 4,000 daily transactions to 120,000, and from 85 resellers to 4,700 in a year. Do It Center cut bounce rate by 90% and reached an NPS of 70. Each figure came from the client first, and each one sits on a case study you can open. - Building digital products since 2007 - CMMI-DEV/3 appraised software design and development unit - AWS Partner Network, Stripe Verified Partner, Shopify Plus Partner - ISTQB, Certified Agile Tester and Scrum Alliance credentials on staff ## Our Koombea values - **Passion**: We read the product, not just the ticket. If a spec would ship something that does not work for your user, you hear it before anyone builds it. That is while the change is still cheap, not at the review. - **Innovation**: AI-First is a working method here, not a label. AI runs across scoping, design, engineering, QA, and deployment. That is the only reason we can fix a price before we know how hard the work turns out to be. - **Respect**: We say when we are the wrong answer. If you have an engineering team and a backlog you own, hourly Staff Augmentation fits better than a Pod. You hear that on the first call, not after the contract. - **Discipline**: Every commitment has a mechanism behind it. We fix scope in points before work starts, and a capacity report goes out weekly. If something slips, you get it in writing that week rather than at the end of a phase. ## How the work is set up One delivery center in Barranquilla, on Colombia hours, with no daylight saving shift. That puts our working day inside the US Eastern business day all year. Same clock as New York in winter, an hour behind it from March to November. One named Delivery Manager owns your priorities and communication, and escalation runs to a named engineering lead and then to leadership. The route is short because the company is not large enough for it to be otherwise. ### What that means in practice - Inside the US Eastern business day: Year round, differing by at most one hour seasonally - One point of contact: A named Delivery Manager, not a shared queue - Response targets agreed before launch: Four severities in writing, and we answer a P1 within two business hours - Your IP, on payment: You own the code, the designs and the documentation ## Our leadership The people below run delivery, engineering, design, quality, and operations. Your Delivery Manager reports into this group, and an escalation that gets past them stops here rather than in a queue. ## Explore our blog Our team writes about what we learn building products. The archive goes back years. ## Partnerships and certifications "We billed for hours for most of this company's history, and the uncomfortable part of that model is that a project going badly is not a bad quarter for the vendor. Story points were the only way I found to put our margin on the same side of the table as your launch date." Jonathan Tarud, Founder and CEO, Koombea