About
By Grant Crawley · 20 January 2020
D. Grant Crawley Ltd, now known as virtco®, was founded over 30 years ago, on 10th April 1992. Over the years the business has evolved, changed and transformed from a PC builder, value added reseller, through software mail order, bespoke software development to become an internet services hosting company. In 2025 we pivoted again, to be the innovation hub we are today, solving problems and accelerating development with AI-augmented software engineering.
In the beginning we operated from Grant's parents' garage, then five years later we moved indoors, and then moved out to rented office space. The way the business has evolved over the years has seen us become more and more virtualised. Servers have moved into the cloud, the office has become redundant and we finally operated as a distributed "virtual company" with no permanent office base, hence our name virtco®.
We have a long history of working with Internet technologies, both directly providing Internet services and utilising the technologies as a tool to help our clients. We created and ran one of the very first online stores, developed a voice-controlled home automation system for severely disabled people in 1994, provided a cloud database solution with live on-page digital image capture to clients as early as 1995 (SaaS) and even did some work for the Formula 1 team; Jaguar Racing. We've been a Nominet member organisation since 1999, and became a Nominet Accredited Registrar organisation in 2014, giving us the ability to register and manage domain names in the .UK namespace. We're a Microsoft Partner, OpenSRS reseller and have been using OpenAI and other frontier model providers' APIs and models since 2020.
Virtco have supplied and supported my businesses for over thirty years, and I have been consistently delighted by the quality of service and the depth of support provided us. Virtco are technically at the top of their game and additionally are great people to work with.
Grant is one of the fastest thinking people I have met - he can spot something a mile off. I really enjoyed working for Grant and would be keen to work with him again. One of the people you aspire to be as good as.
Having worked with Grant for nearly 20 years I cannot think of one time when he did not provide me with all the tools and knowledge needed to start continue or complete any task we needed. His knowledge on all IT matters either hardware or software is incredible. I cannot recommend Grant highly enough.