About
We build AI systems that outlive the engagement
KODA ADVANCED TECHNOLOGIES is a custom AI engineering firm. We are not a platform, a reseller or a staffing shop — we design, build and deploy production systems on our clients' own infrastructure, and then we hand over the keys.
Mission
To put serious AI capability inside the organisations that do real work — owned outright, not rented by the seat.
The last few years produced an enormous amount of AI capability and a surprisingly small amount of AI in production. The gap is not model quality. It is that the hard parts — ingestion, evaluation, integration, monitoring, the organisational work of getting a system trusted — are unglamorous, specific to each business, and not what the market was selling.
That is the work we do. We take one consequential process, instrument it, build the system that improves it, prove the improvement against a number agreed up front, and leave the client able to run and extend it without us.
Our story
Founded on a specific frustration
KODA ADVANCED TECHNOLOGIES was founded by engineers who had spent years watching capable machine-learning work die somewhere between a successful prototype and a production deployment. The models were rarely the problem. The problem was that nobody owned the sixty percent of the work that happens after the notebook: the data pipeline that has to run at 3am, the evaluation set that tells you whether last week's change helped, the operator interface that decides whether anyone trusts the output at all.
So we built the firm around that sixty percent. Fixed-scope engagements, instrumented baselines, evaluation before optimisation, and a handover that ends with the client's team owning the system rather than depending on ours. Forty-plus systems later, the model has held up.
Approach
Six things we believe, and act on
These are not values on a wall. Each one changes what we do in a specific week of a specific engagement.
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Measure before you model
Almost nobody knows their current performance precisely. They have a belief, and the belief is usually wrong in an interesting direction. We instrument the existing process in week one — which has, more than once, changed what the project was for.
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Evaluation is infrastructure
The evaluation harness is designed before the model exists. Without it, "better" is a matter of opinion and the team optimises whatever is most interesting rather than what matters.
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End-to-end before deep
By week three something works badly all the way through. A thin complete path surfaces integration problems while there is still time to fix them; three excellent components with no path between them surface nothing.
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Boring technology on purpose
Gradient-boosted trees beat deep sequence models on most tabular data. Postgres with pgvector serves more retrieval workloads than it gets credit for. We pick the dullest thing that clears the requirement.
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Explanation drives adoption
An unexplained number gets overridden into irrelevance. A forecast that shows its drivers, or an inspection that outlines the region it flagged, gets trusted and used. Adoption failures are usually explanation failures.
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Say no to the wrong project
Roughly one engagement in five ends at discovery with us recommending you do not build. That is the cheapest good outcome available, which is why discovery is contracted separately from the build.
Why KODA
What makes an engagement with us different
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40+ systems shipped
Not pilots. Systems running in production, owned and operated by the clients we built them for, across twelve industries.
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6 weeks to first deployable
Fixed-scope engagements with weekly demos against real data. The deadline is a design tool, not a sales number.
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Full-stack, not model-only
Ingestion, retrieval, evaluation, serving, monitoring and workflow integration. The model is the smallest part of the work.
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True ownership
Source code, weights, evaluation sets, Terraform and documentation delivered into your repositories. No runtime fees, no lock-in.
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Enterprise security
Your VPC, your on-prem hardware, or fully air-gapped. SOC 2-aligned controls, DPAs, and no training on your data — ever.
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Measured, not asserted
Every engagement starts with an instrumented baseline and ends with a pass/fail against the metric agreed in week one.
Team
Small team, senior engineers
Every engagement is staffed with engineers who have shipped the relevant category of system before. There is no pyramid here — the person who scopes your project is the person who builds it.
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Founding Engineer
15+ years delivering ML systems at two FAANG companies and a YC-backed startup. Lead architect on the vision inspection and forecasting engagements. Inter -- Python, Rust, PyTorch, Kubernetes.
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Senior ML Engineer
PhD in NLP (Cambridge). Previously built production RAG systems serving 2M+ queries/day at a legal-tech company. Specialises in retrieval architecture, evaluation pipelines, and making models work on constrained hardware.
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Senior Data Engineer
Built the data platform for a Series B logistics startup from zero to 50TB+. Expertise in streaming pipelines, feature stores, and deploying ML infra in air-gapped and regulated environments. Open-source contributor to Apache Beam.
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Delivery Lead
Ran 30+ enterprise AI programmes at a Big 4 consultancy before joining KODA to keep them small, fixed-scope, and honest. Certified PMP and SAFe agnostic -- what matters is the weekly demo against real data.
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Hiring selectively for senior AI and platform engineers. Introductions welcome at hello@kodatech.org.
Let's scope your AI opportunity
Bring the process that is costing you the most. We will tell you in one call whether there is a system worth building, and roughly what it would take.