About Synnova
Technology for good, in reach of everyone
Not for the few who can afford it. That’s been the point since one person started Synnova in 2011, and it still is.
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2011
Independent since, and intending to stay that way
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15 years
Same course, same convictions
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3 continents
The UK, South Africa and Bermuda among them
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Zero
Investors, boards or layers above the team
Why we exist
Four beliefs, held stubbornly
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Technology can improve almost everything, if it’s done right.
Almost every organisation could work better with the right software behind it. Most of the industry is chasing profit first and outcomes second. We think it runs the other way round: get the thing right, and everything else follows.
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Technology should be used for good, never weaponised.
And it should be within reach of everyone, not rationed to the organisations big enough to buy it. The tools that transform how a business works shouldn’t carry a price tag only enterprises can sign off.
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You can turn a good profit without exploiting anyone.
We set out to prove it. Priced fairly because that’s right, not priced high because we can. Fifteen years in, the proof is that we’re still here, still independent, and still charging what the work is worth.
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Efficient code isn’t an optimisation, it’s the job.
Every site, warehouse and app burns energy to run. Hardware and bandwidth got cheap, and a lot of the industry got sloppy with both. We learned to build when memory came in kilobytes, storage spun on a disk and the internet was dial up, and that discipline still holds: tight, precise, no slop. Which is not the same as boring. We love what technology can do. It just shouldn’t cost the climate to do it, and the answer isn’t to switch it off. The two can coexist. We only have to stop being lazy.
The name
Together, made new
We wanted a name that said what the company was for. It took two syllables and two dead languages.
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Ancient Greek
σύνWith, together with, joined together. The root under synthesis, synergy and synchronise: separate things connected, coordinated, made into a whole.
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Latin
novaNew, fresh, extraordinary. From stella nova, a new star. Something that arrives in the sky suddenly, and brightly.
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The join
SynnovaPut the two together and the double n falls out on its own. Creating something new by bringing things together. Or shorter: together, made new.
The journey so far
One person, then a team, then a course we’ve never changed
Fifteen years of steady work. The team grew, the technology moved on, the conviction stayed put.
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2011 · The start
One person and a conviction
Synnova began as a single engineer who thought consultancy could be honest, and priced like it, working in data, analytics and warehousing, where the truth lives.
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2012 · Further afield
Our first international partner
A South African company brought us in for analytics, data migration and data management. One year old, and already working across continents.
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2014 · One became two
The first hire
We took on our first team member, still with us today. The team has grown carefully ever since.
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Late 2015
Gen 1 of our hosted data warehouse
The first generation of our managed, hosted data warehouse: built once, run for many, so smaller organisations could have what only large ones could afford.
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2020 · When it counted
Built for the pandemic
A patient matching and booking system for the local NHS to deliver Covid-19 vaccinations. Fast, careful work: the kind you only get one attempt at.
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2021 · Leaner still
100% cloud, and automated
We moved the whole company to the cloud and put automation and AI-assisted workflows behind our own work. AI-assisted, never vibe-coded; an engineer signs off every line.
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2023 · Healthcare, overseas
A Bermudan medical practice
Our first international healthcare partner: cloud migration, health systems and analytics for a private practice 3,000 miles away.
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Now
The under-served
Applications, websites, cloud and cross-platform apps, aimed squarely at the small and medium organisations the industry prices out. Cost cut, junk cut, made for them.
How we’re built
The shape of the company
Efficiency in how the company is structured matters as much as efficiency in what we build. Both are engineering problems.
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Deliberately small
Small keeps us lean and keeps costs honest, and it means the people who understand your problem are the people solving it.
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Flat, with no layers
No management tiers, no board, no investors to answer to. There is a CEO because there has to be: a founder with engineering running through them, doing the day-to-day beside the team. One of them, not above them.
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The ideas of the many
The ideas of the many outweigh the strength of the one. A hybrid of everyone’s thinking beats the single idea someone picked, and beats one a board dictated every time.
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Right tools for the job
We fit the technology to the problem, never shape the problem to fit the technology we happen to know or sell. Technologies change and evolve, and so do we.
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Value, never burden
Technology should add demonstrable value, not become another burden to carry. If it can’t show its worth, it shouldn’t be built.
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Hard problems are the good ones
We obsess over the details and take on the conundrums others walk away from. Persistence is an engineering skill.
Our team
Look after the team and the work looks after itself
Our first hire is still with us today. That’s not luck; it’s the whole strategy. We’d rather keep good people for over a decade than churn through them for a quarter.
Everyone here is an equal. Every person adds value, every idea is valid, and the best ideas win regardless of where they came from.
What that looks like in practice
- Flexible hours that fit families and lives, not timesheets
- Work from home, the office, or anywhere that suits
- A weekly paid “work on me” day for wellbeing and personal goals
- Highly competitive salaries and extensive paid annual leave
- Profit share: everyone owns a piece of what we build together
- Work–life balance treated as a priority, not a perk
Where our heart is
Healthcare, education, and small business
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Healthcare
Where we learned our craft and our standards. Data and systems that clinicians and administrators depend on, built to be secure and accurate by default.
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Education
Places doing important work on tight budgets, usually stitched together from tools that were never designed for them. We think that can be much better.
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Small business
The most under-served group in software. They need the same quality as everyone else, without the enterprise price tag or the features nobody asked for.
Over the years that’s meant the NHS and the ambulance service, GP practices and medical practices on small islands, community interest companies and charities, alongside the businesses we build for every day.
Where we’re heading
Make a difference. Be different. Do what’s right.
There’s a whole tier of organisations the software industry has quietly written off: too small for enterprise pricing, too serious for something thrown together. We’re building for them: the tools they need, and the ones they don’t yet realise they need, with the cost and the junk taken out.
Technology now accounts for something like 3.7% of global emissions, roughly on a par with aviation. Nobody set out to do that. It is the accumulated cost of a million small decisions to ship more than the job needed, taken by people who assumed bandwidth was free and that someone else was paying for the power. Someone else is.
So we keep making the efficiency argument, loudly. Lighter sites, leaner pipelines, less compute for the same answer. Build an average page the way it should be built and it uses around 92% less energy every time somebody loads it, and at the scale the web actually runs at that saving is measured in millions of tonnes a year. We will not fix this on our own. We are going to keep pushing anyway, because it costs our clients less, and because it is right.
Small, independent, and answerable to nobody but the people we work with, our partners. We intend to stay that way.