Formos

Formos was founded in 2003 and operates from headquarters in Vancouver, Washington, with development offices in Ho Chi Mihn City and Da Nang, Vietnam, and Quito, Ecuador. The company employs over 60 people in Vietnam alone and maintains a US-based leadership team that includes founder Matthew Tunnell (35+ years in software development), CEO Charles Swatzell, and President & CTO Andrew Fortier. Formos delivers product development, custom business applications, and team augmentation for clients across construction, healthcare, environmental restoration, real estate, and other sectors. The company has worked with clients throughout the Americas, Asia, and Europe over its two-decade run.

Services and capabilities

Formos offers product discovery and prototyping, MVP and full product development, custom enterprise software, team augmentation, web and mobile applications, and managed hosting on AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. On the technology side, the company works across Java, C#, PHP, Python, iOS, Android, React, Angular, Node.js, Django, Ruby on Rails, Spring Boot, and numerous databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MS SQL). The engineering team describes itself as "language agnostic" and emphasizes open-source tools where appropriate to avoid licensing restrictions and ensure clear product paths. Formos' stated approach is agile and feature-driven: work is delivered in short iterations with prioritized features, designed to support urgent goals like investor buy-in or early market adoption.

All offshore staff are full-time employees operating under unified process controls rather than subcontractors or agencies. The company maintains daily videoconference calls between US leadership and teams in Vietnam and Ecuador, and executives spend significant time onsite in international offices to align on practices and culture.

Notable work

JH Kelly, a fourth-generation construction firm, has been a client since Formos's founding in 2003. The engagement began with a comprehensive ERP system to unify fragmented software assets across the company, delivering "significant productivity gains and a 360 degree view of the company." In recent years, Formos built enterprise mobile apps that integrate with JH Kelly's back office and accounting systems and support offline functionality for field operations. ZoomInfo, the sales intelligence platform, engaged Formos in 2014 for platform optimization, scaling, and staff augmentation—a relationship that continues today. OneApp Rentals, an online rental marketplace, had experienced two consecutive development failures before engaging Formos. The company delivered the platform in under six months on time and on budget, enabling OneApp to raise Series A funding. Formos remained the development partner for three years after.

Port Engine, a commercial real estate platform, tapped Formos not just for development but for strategic technical vision and product specification. The Freshwater Trust developed StreamBank with Formos—a web platform to coordinate restoration work across landowners, contractors, and regulatory agencies. StreamBank projects realized an average efficiency increase of 80% over manual processes. Power2Practice, an EMR and practice management system, selected Formos to architect and develop a SaaS platform tailored to integrative medicine practitioners.

How they work

Formos operates on an agile, feature-driven model with short development cycles. The engagement process starts with a strategist from the US team understanding business objectives and scope, then coordinating the global engineering team for delivery. The company offers flexible engagement models: fixed-price projects, staff augmentation, and dedicated team arrangements. On pricing and timeline, the source indicates Formos works with clients to establish "a budget and timeline that meets your goals" but provides no rate card. Daily standups between US and offshore teams keep projects on track. The company controls all its offshore offices directly rather than using subcontractors, which it argues reduces the risk of subcontractor layers and quality variability common in offshore outsourcing.

Team and credentials

Formos is led by founder Matthew Tunnell (35+ years in software development), CEO Charles Swatzell (organizational management and training & development background), and President & CTO Andrew Fortier (Master's in Computer Science, 15+ years in development). The US team includes solutions architects with 15–20+ years of experience, project managers with backgrounds in global teams and Agile practices (some holding CSM and CSPO certifications), and a director of project delivery with experience in healthcare operations and financial analytics. The company employs over 60 people in Vietnam across Ho Chi Mihn City and Da Nang, with a third office in Quito, Ecuador opened in late 2018. No certifications (ISO 27001, SOC 2, etc.) are mentioned in the source material.