Thoughtworks was founded in Chicago in 1993. At that time, information technology was regarded as a cost center — and one with an appalling track record of delivery and wastage.
Thoughtworks aspired to change this through experimenting and learning to drive continuous improvement and the pursuit of excellence in the craft of software development. Our commitment to engineering excellence has seen us grow to become a leading technology consultancy with over 10,000 Thoughtworkers across 48 offices in 19 countries. Today we help our clients to create their own path to digital fluency and to build organizational resilience to navigate the future.
Key milestones
2025
Thoughtworks named as a Leader and a Customer Favorite in The Forrester Wave™ Modern Application Development Services, Q1 2025 report.
2024
Acquired people and technology assets from Watchful.
Mike Sutcliff joins as new Chief Executive Officer and Director.
Thoughtworks is named a Visionary in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Custom Software Development Services, Worldwide.
Thoughtworks Completes Transaction to Go Private in $1.75 Billion Deal with Apax Funds.
2023
Acquired Itoc, a privately-held, AWS-focused cloud infrastructure company based in Brisbane, Australia.
30th anniversary of Thoughtworks.
2022
Acquired Handmade, Brazil
Named a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Modern Application Development Services, Q3 2022
Opened office in Vietnam
Named a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Migration and Managed Service Partners in China Q4 2022
Named a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Migration and Managed Service Partners in Asia Pacific, Q4 2022
2021
Great Place to Work-Certified™ in many global locations, with additional regional rankings such as Best Workplaces for Women™ in Brazil and the UK.
Launched Decoder, the business execs' guide to technology and Looking Glass report.
Launched new brand position and unveiled new logo and visual identity.
Thoughtworks became a publicly listed company with Nasdaq.
2020
Committed to the Valuable 500, the global movement putting disability on the business leadership agenda.
Awarded IT Vendor of the Year by the UK IT Industry Awards.
2019
Published How to Move Beyond a Monolithic Data Lake to a Distributed Data Mesh, introducing a radical new paradigm for data platforms that can enable enterprises to realize value from their data investments.
2018
Surpassed 5,000 Thoughtworkers.
Launched Perspectives: a publication for digital leaders.
2017
Opened first offices in Thailand.
2016
First awarded the winner of the AnitaB.org Institute’s top companies for women technologists, winning again in 2017 and 2018 and recognized as a leader in 2019 and 2020.
2015
Published Building Microservices.
2014
Surpassed 3,000 Thoughtworkers.
2013
2012
Started building Bahmni, an open source Electronic Medical Record (EMR) designed specifically for healthcare providers in low-resource settings.
2011
2010
Published Continuous Delivery: reliable software releases through build, test and deployment automation.
2009
Surpassed 1,000 Thoughtworkers.
2005
2004
Selenium, the leading web application testing framework today, was developed based on work started internally at Thoughtworks.
Surpassed 500 Thoughtworkers.
2001
A 27-year-old Guo Xiao was featured in The Economist as an early adopter of Extreme Programming (XP), an agile software development framework.
Manifesto for agile software development was published (co-authored by our Chief Scientist Martin Fowler).
Released CruiseControl open source software.
2000
Led the industry in adopting a distributed agile development approach.
1999
