Josh Lee and Max Lim understand the importance of collaboration in a digital world. While working for another startup, they relied on a number of project management apps to communicate, collaborate, and complete tasks. But with Josh in the Bay Area and Max in Seoul, maintaining context across several different apps and platforms proved difficult. That’s why, in March 2019, they built Swit, a team collaboration platform that seamlessly combines team chat with task management. “We wanted to bring just the right amount of every remote work essential into one convenient place,” Josh says. Swit allows teams to turn their conversations into trackable tasks and share tasks to chat with simple drag-and-drop functionality, ensuring everyone is on the same page and projects get done faster.

As Swit started to grow and build more functionality into their platform, their app architecture grew more complicated and heavier. To manage this density—and the challenge of scaling their systems, occasional traffic surges, and frequent updates—the team migrated to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), which now allows them to operate 84 workloads and 252 microservices with high stability and 99.9999% uptime. “The migration took one month,” says Josh, “and it turned out to be well worth the effort—our systems were able to offer high scalability and become resilient enough to keep its uptime no matter what happened.”

In 2018, Josh and Max were accepted into the Google for Startups Cloud Program. As part of the program, they received Google Cloud Platform (GCP) credits to support their growth and strengthen Swit’s cloud infrastructure. They also received tailored mentorship and support from the Google Cloud team and other founders in the program. “We learned what a real partnership looks like,” said Max. “Whenever we had questions—whether business-related or technical—we knew we had the strongest partner in the world to ask.”. From introductions to potential venture capitalists, to help with co-marketing and internal product questions, Swit got the strategic partnership they needed to make their vision a reality.