Our approach

We help you decide what to build. Then we build it.

Fifteen years designing and building software for hospitals, universities, retailers and development banks. Every project starts with the same question: what actually needs to exist for this to pay off?

What we’d look at first

Before anyone estimates anything, three questions. They’re the same ones we’d bring to a working session with you.

  1. What's actually worth building

    Not everything on the roadmap deserves to exist. We start by finding the two or three things that would move the business if they shipped this quarter.

  2. What's already there

    The systems you run today, what they can and can't do, and what it would really cost to touch them. Sometimes the answer is a fix, not a rebuild.

  3. What it would take

    A first estimate of scope, team and time. With what we'd leave out, and why.

AI does the volume. People make the calls.

That's one of four things that stay the same whether you bring in a full team, add a few people to yours, or hand us a project end to end.

  1. We understand before we estimate

    Discovery and prototyping come first. That's where we find out what's worth building and, often, what isn't.

    For mEMR, a physician-founded startup, we tested the product with doctors and patients before a line of code was written, and changed the plan because of what we heard. Read the case

  2. A small team, with a lead who answers by name

    Each workstream is led by a senior developer who defines how it gets built, reviews every piece, and signs it into your repository. When you ask why something was done a certain way, there is a person to ask.

    At the Inter-American Development Bank, Smart Portfolio was handed to an internal team that still runs and evolves it today. Work only transfers that way when the decisions behind it are legible to someone who wasn’t there. Read the case

  3. The agents never touch your production data.

    We use AI agents for the high-volume work: components from your design system, patterns repeated across similar features, tests written from acceptance criteria. Every output is reviewed by the lead before it moves on.

    No case behind this one yet. It is a commitment rather than a track record, and it is written to be specific enough to hold us to: ask which decisions are reserved for a person, and ask where the agents are allowed to run.

  4. Integrations first. Security from the first commit.

    When your product depends on systems that are already running, we start with what only reads from them; writes come once we've worked against your real APIs for weeks. Static analysis, dependency scanning and secret detection run on every push, so a critical finding stops a release before it reaches you.

    At Keystone, the contract automation reads on a schedule from the document system the team already used, without disrupting how contracts got filed. On a Stanford Medicine-led research team, HIPAA was treated as a design constraint rather than a technical afterthought, so it shaped data handling, storage, user flows and access controls. Read the Keystone case

What it looks like when it works

35%
better treatment adherence
EmpowerHealth, patient engagement platform. HIPAA-compliant, eleven years in production, 80,000+ patients managed. Also: 20% fewer avoidable ER visits.
4x
lower recruitment cost
Stanford Medicine research apps: app downloads cost four times less through social networks than through conventional ABS outreach. Recruitment tripled and participation doubled against the same comparison.
33%
more conversions
KURU Footwear, after we fixed checkout first, and recommended a smaller contract than the one they were ready to sign.

Three clients, and what we built with them

See all projects

EmpowerHealth uses Onetree as the engineering team behind its patient engagement platform.

  • Product Design
  • Product Development
  • iOS and Android

HIPAA-compliant since the first release.

Read the case
A clinician reviewing patient data with a patient

ConnectAmericas, the IDB’s business network, built ADA with Onetree: an AI matchmaking platform for its members.

  • Product Design
  • Product Development
  • Azure OpenAI

Hundreds of thousands of companies across Latin America and the Caribbean, matched by intent instead of keywords.

Read the case
ADA, the AI matchmaking platform for ConnectAmericas

New Classrooms redesigned Teach to One Roadmap with Onetree, so students and teachers can see what to work on next.

  • Product Design
  • UX Strategy
  • Brand Definition

A layered navigation model, Roadmap to Unit to Skill, that makes progress and next steps legible without adding cognitive load.

Read the case
Teach to One Roadmap, the personalized learning platform

What working with us is like, according to clients

How we can work together

How a project gets delivered is the first decision. Four shapes; which one fits depends on how defined the scope is and how long the product has to live.

Built for regulated environments

Most of our work handles patient, student or financial data. Security isn’t a phase at the end; it’s how the pipeline is set up on day one.

Questions we get asked

  1. How does Onetree start a project?

    Onetree works with a client’s team, and with the people who will use the product, to decide what gets built before estimating it. Discovery and prototyping come first, each workstream has a named lead who reviews and signs every piece, and products that run against existing systems are sequenced so that the integrations that only read come before the ones that write. Onetree works across healthcare, education, financial services and consumer products, mostly in regulated environments.
  2. How do you work with our in-house team?

    Inside it. Your tools, your repositories, your ceremonies. Our lead is your single point of contact, and the code is yours from the first commit.
  3. Where is the team based?

    Across Latin America, working the same hours as your team.
  4. How do you use AI in delivery?

    For high-volume, repetitive work, never on your production data, and always reviewed by the lead before it moves on. Technical authorship stays with people.
  5. What happens in the first month?

    Discovery, a prototype or a technical spike depending on the project, and a release map you can hold us to. You will know what is coming and in what order before we build anything.

Bring us the project you’re weighing.
Leave with a first opinion.