IDEA Foundation
Services/AI for Startups
Co-built with founders — for founders

Co-build AI-native products that win enterprise deals.

We co-build AI-first SaaS and agentic systems for founding teams selling into regulated buyers. Multimodal workflows, production platforms, and a team that thinks past the codebase — into onboarding, pilots, and security reviews.

AI-native co-build·Enterprise-ready·Security reviews·Founder partnership
Why most AI startups stall

The demo lands. The enterprise pilot doesn’t.

Enterprise security review blocks the deal

SOC 2 evidence, data-flow diagrams, prompt logging, model-card disclosure, residency commitments — every enterprise buyer asks. Founding teams ship the demo and stall at the questionnaire.

Hero-engineer dependency

One founding engineer holds the prompt graph, the eval set, the deploy keys. The day they go on leave, the velocity goes with them — and the codebase is unreadable to the next hire.

No evaluation, no defensibility

Without an eval harness and a regression set, every model bump is a coin flip. Enterprise pilots want to see how you measure quality — vibes don't pass procurement.

Demo-to-deploy gap

The Loom looks great. Production has rate limits, retries, prompt drift, observability, fallback paths, and a runbook. The gap between the two is where the timeline slips and the deal goes cold.

Design-partner sprawl

Five logos, five custom integrations, five Slack channels, five different success criteria. Pilots become bespoke forks — and the product roadmap stops being a product.

What we co-build

Engineering past the codebase — into the deal flow.

Platform

AI-native platform engineering

Multi-tenant inference, prompt versioning, vector stores, retrieval pipelines, model gateways — the platform layer that lets the product team ship features instead of plumbing.

Agents

Agentic system architecture

Tool-using agents, structured workflows, function-calling orchestration, human-in-the-loop checkpoints — designed to act inside your customers' systems, not just chat about them.

Evals

Evaluation harnesses

Golden sets, regression suites, LLM-as-judge with calibration, red-team libraries — built so every model bump and prompt change has a measured answer, not a vibe check.

Security

Enterprise security checklists

SOC 2 evidence, data-flow diagrams, residency posture, prompt logging, PII handling, model-card disclosure — the artefacts that get you through procurement, packaged in a data room.

Onboarding

Design-partner onboarding

Onboarding flows, sample-data pipelines, eval rubrics co-defined with the buyer, white-glove success criteria — design partners that turn into reference customers, not custom forks.

GTM

Pilot-to-paid playbook

Pilot scoping, success-metric definition, exit criteria, contract handoff, security-review pack — the operational rail that takes a free trial to a signed enterprise contract.

How we partner

Sprint, pod, or retainer — sized to your runway.

2 – 4 weeks

Founding-team sprint

Practitioners alongside the founders — model selection, eval design, security posture, architecture review. We leave with a costed plan and an enterprise-ready roadmap.

  • ·Co-built with founders
  • ·Eval + security posture defined
  • ·Costed roadmap to enterprise
12+ weeks

Full pod

A complete co-build pod — engineering, ML, MLOps, evaluation — shipping into your repo, your sprints, your release train. Production targets, security artefacts, and pilot playbooks delivered.

  • ·Pod into your repo
  • ·Security artefacts shipped
  • ·Pilot-to-paid playbook
Ongoing

Fractional CTO support

Senior practitioner on retainer — architecture reviews, hiring panels, security-review escalations, board-level technical narrative. Available when the deal hangs on a technical answer.

  • ·Senior practitioner on retainer
  • ·Architecture + hiring reviews
  • ·Board-level technical narrative
CMMI L5·ISO 27001·DPDPA 2023·Enterprise-ready·Security artefacts·Founder partnership
Co-build with founders

Got a deal that hinges on the AI working? Talk to us.