Nairobi-based · Serving businesses across Kenya & East Africa +254 711 362 029 [email protected]

Service · Engineering

Custom AI built around your data and your systems

Off-the-shelf AI is excellent right up to the moment your problem gets specific. When the value lives in your own documents, your own history and your own oddly-shaped process, you need something built — properly, and handed over so you own it.

Document intelligenceRAG over your filesForecastingComputer visionIntegrations

What is custom AI development?

Custom AI development is building an artificial intelligence system specific to one organisation’s data, processes and constraints, rather than configuring a general-purpose product. It typically combines existing foundation models with your own data through retrieval, fine-tuning or structured extraction, wraps them in application logic and integrations, and deploys the result into production with monitoring, evaluation and human oversight.

We are not in the business of training models from scratch — almost nobody should be, and anyone in Kenya offering to do so for a mid-sized business is selling you an expensive science project. The work is in connecting excellent existing models to your specific reality, and in the unglamorous engineering that makes the result trustworthy: validation, evaluation, logging, permissions and rollback.

The other half of the job is integration. Kenyan businesses run on a mix of modern SaaS, legacy on-premise systems, spreadsheets, and one critical application whose original developer is unreachable. We have made peace with this. Most projects involve at least one system with no documentation.

Signs you need this

  • The answer you need is buried in thousands of your own documents.
  • You have years of transaction history and have never forecast from it.
  • A vendor said “we cannot support that” and you still need it.
  • Your data cannot leave Kenya, or cannot leave your building.
  • You need AI inside an existing product you already sell.
  • You tried a generic tool and it did not understand your business at all.

In practice

What we build

All of these are things we have designed for Kenyan operating conditions — patchy connectivity, mixed-quality documents, and systems that were never meant to be integrated.

Document intelligence

Reading invoices, delivery notes, LPOs, contracts, claim forms, title deeds, KYC packs and handwritten records into structured, validated data — including phone photographs taken in bad light.

RAG knowledge systems

An assistant that answers from your own policy manuals, tender library, product specifications or case files, cites its sources, and respects who is allowed to see what.

Forecasting & analytics

Demand, stock, cash flow and staffing forecasts built on your own history, with seasonality that reflects Kenyan reality — school terms, harvest cycles, Ramadan, December, election periods.

Computer vision

Quality inspection on a production line, shelf and planogram checks in retail, damage assessment for insurance claims, and proof-of-delivery verification from driver photographs.

Integration & middleware

The connective tissue: M-Pesa Daraja, KRA eTIMS, ERP and accounting systems, CRMs, SMS gateways, and the in-house system nobody has documentation for.

AI inside your product

If you sell software, we add the AI features your customers are asking for — search, summarisation, drafting, classification — without you rebuilding your team around it.

The same answer, two ways

How a custom AI system gets built and kept alive

We connect a very capable general-purpose brain to your specific information, and put guard rails around it.

The clever part — the model that understands language or images — already exists and is very good. What it does not have is any knowledge of your business. So the job is teaching it, safely, about your documents, your products, your customers and your rules.

We start small and real. Give us fifty of your actual invoices, or a hundred of your actual support questions, and we build something that handles those. Then we test it against cases it has not seen, count how often it is right, and show you the score honestly. If the score is not good enough to be useful, you find that out in week two for a small amount of money, not in month six for a large one.

Once it works, we wire it into your systems, add the checks that stop it doing anything silly, and put a person in the loop wherever a mistake would be expensive. Then we write it all down and hand you the keys — the code, the accounts, the documentation.

Afterwards, things change: providers update models, your products change, volumes grow. That is why we build a test set from your real cases. When anything changes, we can prove in minutes whether the system still does its job, instead of finding out from a customer.

Reference architecture for a production AI system Channels such as WhatsApp, web and email connect to an orchestration layer with an agent runtime, tool calling, and retrieval over a vector index. It reads from business systems including M-Pesa Daraja, ERP and accounting, and CRM, with guardrails, human review, evaluation and audit logging alongside. CHANNELS ORCHESTRATION SYSTEMS OF RECORD WhatsApp Business Website widget Email / helpdesk Internal tools Agent runtime planner · tool calls · memory Retrieval vector + keyword Guardrails PII · scope · limits Human review money · legal Evals accuracy · drift Audit log & observability every action traceable & reversible M-Pesa / Daraja API ERP & accounting CRM & sales Documents & drive C2B · B2C · STK push Odoo · Sage · QuickBooks HubSpot · Zoho · custom SharePoint · Google Drive

The shape of most systems we build. Yours will be a subset — we resist adding components that do not earn their maintenance cost.

What you get

What you own at the end

A production system and everything needed to run it without us.

  • A working system deployed in your own cloud or on your own servers.
  • All source code and infrastructure definitions, in your repository from day one.
  • An evaluation set built from your real cases, with a documented accuracy baseline.
  • Monitoring, logging and alerting configured and explained.
  • Architecture decision records — why each choice was made, including the compromises.
  • Knowledge-transfer sessions with your developers or IT team.
  • A rollback plan and a documented path to swap model providers.

Typical engagement

Timeline4–12 weeks for a first production system
Indicative investmentFrom KES 250,000, scoped and fixed before we start
Who we work withOrganisations with a specific problem no product solves
You ownCode, prompts, docs and accounts — outright

Every quote is fixed before work starts. If we scoped it wrong, that is our risk, not yours. See how pricing works.

Typical stack

PythonTypeScriptPostgres + pgvectorFastAPIClaudeGPTOpen-weight LLMsDockerTerraformAWSAzureLocal hosting

We choose tools your team can maintain, not the ones that make us look clever.

Questions

Custom AI Development — your questions answered

When do we need custom AI instead of an off-the-shelf tool?

Buy off the shelf when your problem is a common one and your process can bend to fit the product — email, scheduling, transcription, generic customer support. Build custom when the value is in your own data or your own process: answering questions from your specific document library, forecasting demand for your specific products, reading your specific paperwork, or connecting systems that no vendor has ever heard of. As a rule of thumb, if a competitor could use the same product with the same settings, buy it.

What is RAG, in plain terms?

Retrieval-augmented generation is how you make an AI answer questions about your information rather than the general internet. Your documents are indexed; when someone asks a question, the system first finds the most relevant passages and then asks the model to answer using only those passages, citing them. It is how you get an assistant that knows your HR policy, your tender history or your product manuals without retraining a model and without it inventing answers.

Where does our data go? Does it train someone else's model?

You decide, and we make the choice explicit rather than burying it. With the major commercial API providers, business and enterprise tiers do not train on your data by default — but that is a contractual position we check for your specific plan, in writing, rather than assume. Where data cannot leave the country or your building, we deploy open-weight models on infrastructure you control. That costs more and performs somewhat below the frontier models, and we will show you the trade-off with real numbers so you can decide.

Do you hand over the source code?

Always. Code, prompts, evaluation sets, infrastructure definitions and documentation live in your repository under your account from the first commit, not ours. You can dismiss us at any point and another team can pick it up. We think being replaceable is a feature — it is the only honest way to earn a renewal.

How do you make sure it keeps working after launch?

Three things. An evaluation set built from your real cases with expected outputs, so any change can be regression-tested before it ships. Production monitoring on accuracy proxies, escalation rates and cost. And a documented rollback path, because models get deprecated and providers change behaviour with little notice. The evaluation set is the durable asset here — models will be swapped several times over a system’s life; the tests that prove it still works are what you keep.

Can you work with our existing developers?

Yes, and we prefer it. The best outcome is that your team can maintain and extend what we built. We pair with in-house developers, review their code, run knowledge-transfer sessions, and write documentation aimed at whoever inherits this in two years — including the parts we are least proud of and why they are that way.

Keep exploring

Other ways we help

Most clients combine two or three of these.

Start here

Let’s find the hours your business is losing

Book a free 30-minute call. We will map one process end to end, tell you honestly whether AI is the right answer, and put a number on what fixing it is worth. No slide deck, no jargon.

Nairobi-based · We reply the same working day · English & Kiswahili

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