HomeToGo: From founding to EUR 1 billion IPO. Engineering partner for 7 years, 150 engineers at peak.

The Challenge

HomeToGo launched into one of the most technically demanding categories in travel: marketplace aggregation at global scale. On day one, the platform needed to ingest, normalize, and serve real-time inventory from dozens of third-party supply systems, each with different data formats, update frequencies, pricing logic, and reliability characteristics. Any latency, data inconsistency, or downtime translates directly to lost bookings and eroded partner trust. The founding team faced a compounding constraint: building a world-class engineering organization fast enough to capture market position, while the product itself was being defined. Recruiting sufficient senior engineering talent internally on Berlin startup timelines was not feasible. The architecture decisions made in the first 12 months would either enable or constrain every capability built on top of them for years. The stakes were clear. Vacation rental marketplace economics depend on scale, inventory breadth, supplier reliability, and booking conversion rates compound. Getting the infrastructure wrong in the early years would mean rebuilding under competitive pressure later.

The Approach

NFQ (represented by Gradion) joined as HomeToGo’s founding engineering partner in 2014. Rather than a time-boxed project, the engagement model was embedded long-term partnership: Gradion engineers sat inside the HomeToGo product teams, shared engineering standards, and scaled with the business across its growth phases. Architecture decisions prioritized long-term scalability and operational cost-efficiency from the start. Gradion helped design a cloud-native infrastructure built to handle concurrent high traffic, continuous API data ingestion, and aggressive A/B testing cadences without deployment risk. The team adopted Lean Startup methodology, Extreme Programming practices, Trunk-Based Development, and CI/CD pipelines - a deliberate combination chosen to maintain development velocity as team size scaled. The integration layer required special attention. Connecting 100+ third-party supply APIs, each with its own schema and behavior under load, demanded systematic normalization architecture rather than case-by-case integration. Gradion led this work while simultaneously maintaining the production platform. What was hardest: coordinating a distributed multi-timezone engineering organization, eventually 150 engineers across four offices in three countries, while maintaining product coherence and deployment confidence. Gradion held this together through embedded team structure, shared tooling, and consistent engineering standards applied across geographies. As HomeToGo matured toward IPO readiness, the depth of Gradion’s integration into the product organization was such that HomeToGo exercised a contractual option to acquire the engineering team outright, absorbing them in-house ahead of the 2021 listing.