Full Scale Makes the Inc. 5000 List Four Years in a Row

Inc. magazine just put Full Scale on its Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing private companies. That makes four years in a row.

Four years on that list is the part I’m proud of.

Plenty of companies crack the Inc. 5000 once. Staying on it through a developer hiring crunch, a round of big-tech layoffs, and the arrival of AI is a different thing. It means clients kept hiring us, our developers kept delivering, and the model we bet on in 2018 kept working.

This post puts all four years in one place and, more than anything, says thank you to the people who got us there.

Four years, four rankings

Here’s where Full Scale landed each year on the Inc. 5000:

Year	Inc. 5000 rank (U.S.)
2022	No. 878
2023	No. 3,984
2024	No. 3,432
2025	No. 4,489

That first year still surprises me. We came in at No. 878 in the country on the back of 723% growth over three years, plus No. 78 in Business Products and Services and No. 6 in all of Kansas. Inc. also named us a Power Partner that year for the engineering work we do for other companies’ product teams.

The number moved around after that, and that’s normal. The list ranks you against every other fast-growing private company in the country, so your spot swings with the field as much as with your own growth. What matters to me is the streak.

Four straight years means the growth wasn’t a one-time spike.

Why the Inc. 5000 is actually a big deal

If you’ve never paid much attention to the Inc. 5000, here’s why it’s worth more than a plaque on the wall.

The list has been around since 1982. To get on it you have to be a private, U.S.-based company that can show real, audited revenue growth over three straight years. It isn’t a badge you buy or a popularity contest. That’s why it means something to land on it once, and more to keep landing on it.

How we got here

Full Scale exists because of a problem my co-founder Matt DeCoursey and I kept running into at our own companies: good developers are hard to find and even harder to keep.

Back in 2018 we flew to Cebu, in the Philippines, to open an office and hire developers for our own teams. Other founders saw it working and asked us to do the same for them. That was the whole business plan.

The hiring problem never went away. The U.S. still has more open software jobs than people to fill them, and companies outside the big coastal hubs still can’t outbid the tech giants for talent. So we built Full Scale to fix that, and the model is simple. We recruit and vet developers in the Philippines, hire them as full Full Scale employees with real pay, benefits, and equipment, then place them on one client’s team where they work like any other member of that team. Done right, that’s what a good offshore team should feel like, less like a vendor and more like your own people.

That isn’t freelancing.

Our developers work exclusively for one client, but they’re ours, which is why they stay. We sort through more than 1,000 applications a month and hire something like the top 3% who clear our vetting process. Today that’s a team of 350+ in the Philippines, with developer retention over 93% in an industry where call-center and outsourcing turnover is famously brutal. We’ve been Great Place to Work Certified two years running, with 95% of our people saying it’s a great place to work, against 65% at a typical company.

Since 2017 we’ve placed more than 500 developers with clients. That’s the growth Inc. is measuring.

The growth is really our clients’ growth

Here’s the thing about our spot on that list.

We grow when they grow.

Take AMC Theatres. When their CIO, Derrick Leggett, started building his engineering org, AMC had around 170 theatres and no website or app. Today it’s 900+ theatres worldwide running the largest movie-ticketing platform on the planet, and Full Scale developers in the Philippines sit on that team as full AMC engineers, not contractors behind a vendor wall. As Derrick put it, “Technology’s gone from being a sideshow to being the center of almost everything we do at AMC.” When technology is the center of your business, you need more good engineers and you need them to stay. That’s where we come in.

Or LendingStandard, where CEO Andy Kallenbach has scaled his team with us through several growth spurts:

“Onboarding an outsourced team and quick integration is a significant process that Full Scale is uniquely adept at. LendingStandard has seen multiple company growth spurts and Full Scale continues to pay dividends in delivering the velocity and developer innovation our clients demand.”

Andy Kallenbach, CEO, LendingStandard

Stories like those are the reason there’s a number next to our name on the Inc. 5000 at all.

2026: still growing, still hiring

It’s 2026 now, and we’re still growing. We’re up about 30% over last year, and demand for what we do hasn’t slowed down. If anything, AI has made it sharper. Every company wants to ship more software faster, and good engineers are still the bottleneck.

So the streak isn’t really the point.

The point is that the thing we built still works, for our clients and for the developers we hire.

If you’re trying to scale an engineering team without blowing your budget, that’s exactly what we do, and we’re still one of the best in the business at it.

Ready to scale your engineering team?

We’ll match you with experienced, vetted developers in the Philippines who can join your team in a matter of days. Hire developers with Full Scale and let’s build something.