12-year Partnership: Transforming HR Tech Startup to Enterprise-Ready Platform

Over the years, our work transitioned to ongoing development and maintenance while Cooleaf evolved into an employee benefits platform targeting corporate organizations. The technical debt also grew as the platform grew in complexity and business logic. Both the application architecture and the technology stack became outdated. AngularJS, once a cutting-edge technology a decade ago, has become insufficient and unsupported. We faced a critical dual challenge: maintaining the legacy codebase while implementing new features.

In April 2024, ITA Group acquired Cooleaf, leading to new challenges, including compliance requirements and integration with larger systems.

Comprehensive security audits became essential to establishing Cooleaf as a credible partner for enterprise clients. However, the outdated technology stack made meeting modern security standards increasingly difficult.

1. Transitioning from an outdated AngularJS while maintaining existing functionality and addressing security vulnerabilities.

2. Adapting the platform for international operations with support for multiple languages, currencies, time zones, and compliance requirements.

3. Collaboration with various ITA teams and stakeholders for different aspects of the product

Long before the acquisition by ITA, we initiated a comprehensive rewrite and redesign of the entire application, transforming the outdated platform into a modern, supported system. We adopted a modular approach to effectively managing technical debt across Cooleaf's three separate applications. For the frontend, we migrated from AngularJS to React Native Web, enabling significant code sharing between platforms and ensuring consistency between ReactJS (web) and React Native (iOS/Android).

The technical overhaul included significant backend and database improvements with a redesign of most application components. The backend was powered by Ruby on Rails, selected for its proven performance with high-traffic applications and complex databases. This robust API server efficiently handles all routing and communication with the frontend. Our team also implemented seamless third-party integrations, including Power BI for reporting and a separate gift catalog application with an invisible transition for users without compromising the core codebase.

A key milestone was establishing specialized Business Assurance and Business Development teams. The former is dedicated to bug fixes, performance optimization, security updates, and refactoring, while the latter is responsible for new feature development and redesigning major application components.

The ongoing comprehensive modernization helped Cooleaf become an attractive player in the HR tech market and partner with the ITA group. We helped Cooleaf successfully transition from serving small clients to supporting enterprise organizations, with infrastructure prepared for onboarding 17 major organizations.

The platform now stands out for its intuitive user interface, comprehensive functionality, and highly customizable reward systems.

Cooleaf partners with a team that can introduce customized features and security measures to meet specific enterprise requirements and deal with unique requests, such as implementing a "Parity" concept for point calculations based on user location. Thanks to a strategic division into BD and BA teams, we can spin off a new team focused on new projects, e.g., AI-based functionalities like AI surveys or recognition AI functions. 

• Building comprehensive digital ecosystem including web applications, mobile applications, and admin panels with seamless integration capabilities

• Implementing a comprehensive communication framework to manage this complex, multi-stakeholder project effectively

• Organizing work of almost 20 specialists into dedicated, specialized teams