We find the risk in the technology
then build the systems that create the value.
Senior engineers who de-risk the tech behind your thesis and ship the platforms your portfolio companies run on. NASA-grade reliability, assessment before pitch, value measured the way your board measures it.
Built for NASA, DARPA and a global compliance advisory · 20+ years of regulated-industry delivery · Assessment-first, always
Currently booking discovery calls
(NASA PIXL, Mars 2020)
on the same workload
on a platform we built
your team at exit
Outcomes we have reported, not promised. Every engagement ends with a system your team owns.
From thesis to value
The technology is usually the risk nobody priced.
Most mid-market portfolio companies run on systems held together by a few key people and a decade of shortcuts. The value-creation plan assumes the tech will keep up. Often it cannot, and that surfaces after close, not before. We close that gap from both ends: a clear-eyed technical read before you commit, and senior engineers who modernise and ship after you do.
Know what you are buying.
A technical read of the platform, team, and failure modes. Board-ready in two weeks. You keep the analysis even if the deal does not close.
Make it hold.
Strangler-fig migrations, new platforms, AI in production. Phased delivery, milestone reviews, zero-downtime cutover.
Value that outlasts us.
Documented, tested, owned by your team at exit. No lock-in, no dependency on us, no C2C hooks in the platform.
One team, two buyers
We speak to the operating partner and the operator, and connect them.
The operating partner needs a defensible read on risk and a value case. The operator needs systems their team can actually run. We do both, and we do not hand either one slideware.
For operating partners
De-risk the deal, then move the value plan.
- ·Pre-deal or post-close technical diligence, scored by risk and cost
- ·A lighthouse modernisation shipped on hold-period timelines
- ·Reliability discipline that protects the number at exit
- ·Direct access to senior builders. No layered staffing
For portfolio operators and data leaders
Ship production systems your team owns.
- ·Senior engineers embedded, not a rotating bench
- ·Agentic AI and data platforms running in production, not demos
- ·Full handover. Code, docs, infrastructure, training
- ·Stack chosen for your roadmap, not our partnership tier
Productised, so you can buy with confidence
Four ways in. Each starts with a technical read.
No open-ended discovery. No surprise at the board meeting. Start with a two-week diligence read, or commit to a full modernisation.
Know the risk before you commit.
2 weeks · $15K-$25K
A senior read of the platform, team, and failure modes. Pre-deal or post-close. Risk map, cost drivers, and a quantified remediation plan. Board-ready. You keep the analysis even if we do not do the build, and if we do, the Read fee is credited in full against it.
Explore the ReadFrom assessment to production.
3-6 months · $120K-$500K
A senior pod modernises the platform and ships the new capabilities. Phased delivery, milestone reviews, zero-downtime cutover. Full documentation and handover built in.
Explore ModerniseIdea to shipped product, price locked.
8-12 weeks · fixed, from $40K (10-day scoping from $8K)
For portfolio companies launching something new. Scope and price fixed before a line of code. Production in weeks, your team owns everything at handover.
Explore MVP developmentDirector-level leadership without the hire.
Monthly · $12K-$25K / mo
Technical strategy, team building, delivery discipline, and vendor management for a portfolio company that has the headcount but not the leadership.
Explore LeadershipHow an engagement runs
From read to shipped, with a checkpoint at every phase.
Days 1-10
Read
Platform, team, and failure-mode audit. Risk and cost quantified. Board-ready.
Weeks 2-6
Architect
Target architecture, migration plan, guardrails. Nothing built until the plan survives scrutiny.
Weeks 6-14
Build and cut over
Pipelines, platforms, and AI to production. Zero-downtime migration. Monitoring in place.
Handover
Own it
Documentation, paired work, training. Your team runs it the day we leave. Or we stay on. Your call.
Proof in production
We do not pitch pilots. We ship systems that hold.
From 30 hours to 10 minutes, on hardware 140 million miles away.
We built the cloud backend for the Mars Perseverance rover's PIXL spectrometer. Cutting analysis from 30 hours to 10 minutes so scientists act the same sol. NASA Software of the Year runner-up, 2023.
180× faster · 74% lower cost · 12-week concept to production →
Sanctions compliance · Global advisory (NDA)
Agentic AI in a compliance platform
Built into a sanctions-compliance platform live across 20+ financial institutions. AI inside production rigour, not a demo beside it.
Fintech analytics · Consilient
Excel workflows turned into dynamic software
Manual analyst workflows replaced with flexible, dynamic software the team actually uses. Faster processing, higher accuracy.
Research infrastructure · Princeton
Reusable platform, concept to live beta
Reusable research infrastructure that replaced one-off crawlers. 14-person team, 18 months, 100+ active beta users.
Why firms choose us
Six reasons, one engineering standard.
01
Reliability for the highest stakes
Every system ships with a tested answer for how it breaks and how you recover. Before go-live. The same discipline that built infrastructure for NASA missions, where there was no second deploy.
02
Diligence before pitch
Every engagement opens with a technical read, never a packaged proposal. You walk away with a usable analysis even if we are not the team to build it.
03
AI inside the hard systems
Most firms ship AI demos. We built agentic AI into a sanctions-compliance platform live across 20+ financial institutions. Leverage inside production rigour, not outside it.
04
Built to be handed over
Documentation, paired work, and training are scheduled into the engagement. Your team owns the system at exit. No lock-in dressed up as a retainer.
05
Stack chosen, not preferred
AWS, Azure, GCP. Polars and Spark. Postgres and DAPR. No vendor allegiance at the table, so architecture serves your roadmap, not our partnership tier.
06
Patterns across regulated domains
Aerospace, fintech, pharma, research. Failure modes rhyme even when the systems do not. Your build inherits a decade of lessons from places where reliability was already the rule.
"Absolutely critical as an engineering leader. A partner, collaborator, and leader."
"Tom and his team came in and transformed the highly manual Excel work into a flexible, dynamic piece of software."
Questions PE firms ask first
The honest answers before you commit.
How is a pre-deal Technical Read different from post-close diligence?
Same discipline, different clock. Pre-deal is compressed to 10 business days so it fits inside a diligence window, focuses on risk that changes the price you pay, and produces a memo your team can put in front of an IC. Post-close is the same read with more access to the internals and a longer horizon on the remediation plan. The point of doing it pre-deal is that some of what we find is worth walking away from, or repricing over.
Can we run the Technical Read alongside the commercial or legal DD teams?
Yes, and we prefer it. We plug into the existing DD workflow, take briefings from the deal team, and hand back a read that lines up with the risk register commercial and legal are building. Most partners we work with route us data-room access and one engineering-side call and let us go.
Do you take equity or performance fees in place of cash?
No. Everything is fixed fee or milestone-billed against a written plan. That keeps the incentives aligned with your fund and your LPs, and it keeps the read honest. If a deal is not worth doing, we tell you, and getting paid for the read is what makes that answer costless to give.
What size portfolio company does this actually fit?
Lower and middle market. We are the wrong team for a $2B revenue platform that already has a 200-engineer team; they need to hire, not engage a boutique. We are the right team for a $10M-$250M revenue portfolio company where the technology is core to the thesis but the engineering org is small, brittle, or run by one person who left last quarter.
Do you specialise in a vertical, or are you horizontal engineering?
Horizontal engineering, with vertical scars. Aerospace, fintech, regulated compliance, healthcare data, scientific research. The reason we get called into regulated portcos is that reliability and audit trail engineering translate between industries even when the domain vocabulary does not.
What happens when we exit?
Nothing that we control. Everything we build ships with documentation, tests, runbooks, and cloud accounts under your portco's control. Your operating team, a strategic buyer's team, or the next PE owner picks it up on day one. There is no C2C dependency in the platform at exit. That is the whole design.
Are you US-based? Where does the team sit?
Alexandria, Virginia, in the DC metro. Tom is US-based. The senior bench is US and UK. No offshore staffing on your engagements; the people who write the read are the people who run the build.
For the deal team
Take one thing with you.
The checklist and the two guides below are what we hand to operating partners we work with. Free, no email required to read the guides. The checklist is a PDF.
Free checklist · PDF
Pre-Acquisition Tech Diligence Checklist
Eight sections, 40 questions sorted live in the browser, five deal-changer red flags, and an IC-ready verdict. Built from the 10-day Technical Reads we run.
Get the checklist →Pillar · Ungated
The Operating Partner's Technology Playbook
Close to exit. Pre-deal diligence, 100-day plan, hold-period discipline, exit prep. What good tech reporting to the board looks like.
Read the playbook →Pillar · Ungated
Build vs Buy Sanctions Screening
For portcos in RegTech and financial-crime compliance. Framework, USD TCO comparison, decision rubric.
Read the framework →Free tools
The diligence funnel, self-serve.
Score a target, run the question-by-question checklist, and pressure-test the AI story, all free in the browser before you commission the read.
Free Scorecard · scored in your browser
Portfolio Tech-Risk Scorecard
Score the target across six dimensions in ten minutes.
Open itFree Checklist · scored in your browser
Pre-Acquisition Tech Diligence Checklist
The 40 questions and five red flags, sorted live in the browser.
Open itFree Scorecard · scored in your browser
AI-Readiness Audit
Whether the AI story in the deck survives contact with the data.
Open itStart with a read
Let us find where the risk and the value actually is.
Thirty minutes with a senior engineer. Send a few lines about the company, the platform, or the deal. We will write back honestly about whether we are the right team. If we are not, we will point you to someone who is.
Book a technical readNo pitch deck. No sales funnel. Real engineering talk. Tom reads every brief.