For those who have been on the journey with us from the beginning, it will seem that, from a distance, we have evolved a logo and colour scheme. However, fundamentally, it has been deeper than that. At each stage of our business evolution, we have taken lessons we have learned from our clients, team members and new technology to pivot towards a more refined offering.
While much of our recent branding and marketing has been on our exciting new product, Virtuworx, our clients know us for so much more. Our aim has always been to enable our clients to do more with less. Almost all of our products are visually-based and designed to provide them with unique insights to enable them to engage with the world in different ways. That wasn’t always the case.
Before The Virtulab, there was IRIS Group (founded in 2015), which focused on data collection across several sectors, both ground and airborne. These include security, construction, oil and gas, and agriculture. Many of our current clients joined us at this stage of our business evolution, and still benefit from the services provided. This gave us a grounding in data collection, which now forms the basis of one of our most important products, VirtuServices.
In October 2019, CG Tech decided to collect all its innovation teams and resources around the group and combine them into the IRIS Group with a rebrand to become CG Labs. This allowed us to provide our clients with an end-to-end solution, offering data collection, manipulation and the ability to create whatever they needed in-house.
This rebranding encouraged our smartest minds, under the leadership of CTO Wayne Strydom, to perform skunk works; they did R&D and innovation for the group companies, as well as servicing our existing clients with both old and new skills.
Just over a year later, it was clear that this amalgamation of services, skilled people and plenty of time and effort had transformed us into the digital enabler we are today. It was this realisation (along with a nudge from the COVID-19 pandemic) that encouraged us to take the next big step in our business evolution journey. In August 2020, we became The Virtulab.
Lessons, successes and a few scars along the way have led us to where we are today. To the clients who have stuck with us since the beginning, we can’t thank you enough! And to anyone else reading and wondering how we can help to digitise your business, click here to check out our VirtuServices.