A small studio building custom software for healthcare, fintech, and other regulated industries. Based in the hills of Western Massachusetts.
Andrew Ettenger is the founder and principal engineer at East Branch Software. The company grew out of more than a decade shipping software inside regulated environments — including leading engineering on the launch of Xfinity Mobile, Comcast's MVNO (a heavily-regulated telecom build covering CPNI handling, FCC reporting, and carrier integrations), and rebuilding the subscription and payments flow for the Philadelphia Inquirer under PCI scope.
That work made one thing obvious: in regulated industries, the gap between what teams think compliance means and what an actual audit finds is enormous. Million-dollar GRC platforms get bought while the team papers over the real workflow gaps in spreadsheets. We build the focused tools that close those gaps for real.
We've worked with everything from Rails monoliths to microservices, React SPAs to Phoenix LiveView — plus the audit logging, role-based access controls, and PHI-handling patterns regulated environments actually need. We're particularly interested in AI integration, but only with the guardrails compliance demands. The tech stack matters less than understanding what you're trying to build and what rules govern it.
Every project starts with understanding the real problem. Not the policy document, not the compliance checklist as written, but the actual workflow — or audit gap, or PHI exposure — that's broken. Once we identify that, we build the simplest thing that fixes it. Then we ship it. Then we iterate based on real usage and real audit feedback.
This approach comes from years of watching overcomplicated systems fail review while simple, well-instrumented tools sail through. Your organization doesn't need another GRC platform. It needs software that solves specific problems, generates the evidence you need, and gets out of the way.
We work out of Chesterfield, a small town in the hills of Western Massachusetts. Remote-first by design, with clients and collaborators across the country.
