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Forward-deployed engineering

Vid·ara

We embed in your operation, find the work worth automating, and build it with applied AI.

Not a strategy deck, and not a pilot that dies in a slide. Engineers inside the process, shipping production systems your own team runs. Twenty years of production engineering behind every build.

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How we work

Most companies do not need an AI strategy. They need four processes fixed.

The hard part is knowing which four, and being honest about which steps a model should never touch. So we start inside the work: we sit with the people doing the job, follow the process end to end, and measure where the hours actually go. Then we build the thing that gives those hours back.

  1. 01

    Embed

    We work from inside your operation rather than from a workshop. A week beside the team doing the job surfaces more than a month of interviews, because the interesting part is never in the process document.

  2. 02

    Map

    We trace each process end to end and put numbers on it: how often it runs, how long it takes, where it stalls, who it waits for, and what it costs on the days it goes wrong.

  3. 03

    Choose

    We rank candidates by hours returned against risk carried, and we tell you which steps should stay with a person. A process with a legal consequence and ten runs a year is not the one to automate first.

  4. 04

    Build

    Production from the first commit: observability, tests, a rollback path, and a human in the loop wherever a wrong answer would be expensive to discover late.

  5. 05

    Hand over

    Your team runs it without us. Documentation, training, and the source. We would rather be brought back for the next process than kept on for this one.

What a good candidate looks like

  • It runs often enough that the hours add up
  • The inputs are already digital, or one step away
  • A wrong answer is recoverable, or a person checks it
  • Somebody can tell you what correct means

When a process fails these, we say so and leave it alone. The fastest way to lose trust in automation is to point it at the wrong work.

What we do

Seven practices, one studio. Held to the same standard.

We're a small studio with twenty years of compounded experience shipping software and standing up teams inside government, fintech, adtech, recruitment, and emerging-market startups. The practices below are where the method lands most often. They share a single bar: production-grade, observable, secure by design, honest about what works.

01

Process discovery and automation

The core engagement. We embed, map how the work actually runs, rank what is worth automating against what it would cost to get wrong, and build the ones that pay. Applied AI where it earns its place, and ordinary software everywhere else.

  • Process mapping with real numbers, not a workshop output
  • A ranked shortlist, including what to leave manual
  • Document and email pipelines, extraction, routing, reconciliation
  • Human review built in wherever a wrong answer is costly

02

Go-to-market and sales operations

Usually the first process a company automates, because leaving it manual is paid for in lost deals. The conversion layer, a lead-qualification engine, CRM and calendar integration, and attribution that ties the first ad click to the closed deal. Across markets and languages.

  • Conversion layer and CTAs across EU, UK and West Africa
  • Connects to any major CRM, ATS, sales tool or calendar
  • Ad-click-to-closed-deal attribution in one dashboard
  • Pages built for the LLMO and SEO landscape of 2026

03

Customer conversations

Doc-grounded agents on WhatsApp and web that qualify prospects, advance deals, and feed structured records into your systems. They answer from your own material and say they don't know rather than inventing an answer.

  • Lead capture and qualification, around the clock
  • Calendar booking and document delivery in-thread
  • Structured extraction into the CRM every turn
  • Multilingual, auto-detected per visitor

04

Finance and back office

The work that quietly consumes a finance team: reconciliation, matching documents to transactions, multi-tenant ledgers, admin consoles. Production-grade fintech with the compliance posture that pension and investment work taught us.

  • Receipt and invoice ingestion, extraction, matching
  • Real-time reconciliation and ledger integrity
  • Multi-tenant and audit-compliant by design
  • Built for finance teams, not for engineers

05

Custom platforms

When off-the-shelf doesn't fit. Multi-tenant SaaS, recommendation engines, verifiable credential wallets, recruitment and HR systems, high-traffic loyalty platforms. The ones we've built ship to millions.

  • Domain-driven design, observable by default
  • AI-native architectures where they earn their place
  • GDPR and regional compliance postures
  • From zero-to-one prototype to production scale

06

Market entry and hub building

Opening a commercial presence in a new country, end to end. We find and headhunt the right people, hire the local lead first, and build the hub top-down so it runs on the ground and not just on paper.

  • Executive search and headhunting for the founding team
  • Local lead hired first, hub built top-down
  • New-market entry across EU, UK and West Africa
  • From first hire to a running commercial hub

07

Embedded engineering and due diligence

Engineers inside your team on mission-critical systems. Architecture reviews, technical due diligence, engineering management. We've spent years inside government, adtech and fintech teams, which is where the forward-deployed habit comes from.

  • Architecture and code-quality review
  • Technical due diligence for investors
  • Embedded engineering leads on long engagements
  • Incident response and observability rollouts

Selected work · a process

A sales qualification process, automated end to end.

A B2B sales team was losing inbound prospects to response time. Qualification happened when an SDR got to it, which on a Sunday evening meant Monday. We mapped the process, found that the first three questions were the same every time, and automated exactly that part: prospects ask the sales material questions, the agent answers from the company's own documents, and a structured lead lands in the CRM before the morning stand-up. The SDR still runs the call.

The conversation

Sunday evening, fleet manager taps a WhatsApp CTA on a landing page:

Hi, saw your product at the trade event. Run a 42-truck fleet, cold chain + general haulage.
Welcome! Quick three: incident or insurance trigger pushing this now? Interior or exterior priority? And when's your current contract up?
Two near-misses last quarter. Both interior and exterior. Contract ends in Q3.
Got it. Putting you with our UK lead. Tuesday 14:00 GMT or Thursday 10:00 GMT? Sending the 360° one-pager so you can preview.
Tuesday works. Send it over.

What landed in the CRM

Lead created · 42 vehicles · cold chain + haulage · pain: incidents + false claims · contract end Q3 · demo booked Tue 14:00 GMT · one-pager delivered in-chat. SDR notification fired.

Under the hood

  • Grounding

    Website crawl + PDF/DOCX ingest. Retrieval over indexed material; answers cite source passages for audit.

  • Safety

    Post-pass scrubber removes answers not supported by retrieved material. The agent says "I don't know" honestly.

  • Tools

    Book-meeting (any scheduler), send-doc, update-CRM, escalate-to-human. Per-stage whitelist.

  • Languages

    Multilingual. Per-user auto-detect; mid-conversation switching.

  • Channel

    Signed-webhook verification, 1600-char auto-split, circuit breaker, voice-note transcription, in-thread PDF delivery.

  • Compliance

    Persistent consent + STOP state machine. GDPR-defensible by design.

More work · a platform

An entire recruitment platform, built end to end.

For EdoMatch we built the whole stack: a two-sided recruitment platform and HR suite, the conversational agents that run on top of it, and the converting product pages that bring people in. Four practices from this studio, in one production system.

Recruitment platform & HR suite

A two-sided hiring ecosystem

A recruitment platform pairing jobseekers with employers on a tiered match-confidence engine, plus a full HR suite for the teams that hire. Built for EdoMatch, running across multiple markets.

  • Match-confidence scoring with multi-region search and fallback tiers
  • Document OCR and structured profile extraction at intake
  • HR suite: onboarding, contracts, timesheets, payroll, billing
  • Country-specific contract generation and compliance postures

Conversational infrastructure · B2C

A career coach that lives in the chat

A channel-agnostic assistant that guides jobseekers on WhatsApp and web. Deterministic flows keep it on-rails, multilingual from the first message, and honest about what it doesn't know.

  • State-machine flows over free-form chat for reliable outcomes
  • Multilingual with per-user auto-detect and mid-thread switching
  • Layered safety: tool whitelist, structured extraction, no bluffing
  • Reads and generates documents in-thread

Conversational infrastructure · B2B

Document-grounded agents per company

Multi-tenant WhatsApp agents grounded in each company's own material, with an admin dashboard to configure them, track visitors, and hand off to a human when it counts.

  • Retrieval over a company's own documents, answers cite their source
  • Per-tenant isolation and injection-guarded scope
  • Lead capture, timezone-aware booking, escalation to a human
  • Admin console for agent config and conversation oversight

Converting landing pages

Product pages built to be found

The public product and landing pages behind EdoMatch: fast, structured for search and LLMs, and instrumented so every experiment proves itself.

  • Schema.org structured data and dynamic social images per page
  • Core Web Vitals tuned, lazy-loaded, multi-region
  • Analytics, feature flags and A/B testing wired in
  • Internationalised, canonical, citation-ready content

Track record

Twenty years of shipping inside high-stakes environments.

The studio compounds two decades of engineering inside Dutch government, European fintech and adtech, white-label enterprise, and emerging-market startups. Across three companies we co-founded, and inside teams at Politie Nederland, Adevinta, LeasePlan, Nationale Nederlanden, and Macaw.

Where we've built

Government

National security systems for law enforcement: biometrics, fingerprints, legal identity. Priority-1 zero-downtime postures, multi-tenant audit compliance.

Finance & investments

Pension service web applications and investment partner platforms. Compliance-first delivery, security by design, real-money flows.

High-load adtech

Multi-tenant B2B advertising platforms across NL and BE at Adevinta / Marktplaats scale. Domain-driven design, observability, fast safe releases.

Recruitment & HR

Recruitment platforms from LeasePlan's join.leaseplan.com to a full digital recruitment ecosystem in West Africa. Identity, matching, candidate experience.

Healthcare & e-commerce

White-label pharmacy e-commerce, loyalty platforms at national scale. Pragmatic stacks, predictable releases, durable products.

Emerging markets

Ultra-light onboarding flows for low-connectivity environments. GDPR + NDPR security postures. AI-powered recommendation engines built for context, not just for show.

How we work

Production-grade by default

Every line ships behind observability, tests, and a rollback path. We don't hand over prototypes.

Security & compliance built in

GDPR, NDPR, audit trails, identity, encryption. Compliance is a posture, not a checklist run at the end.

AI where it earns its place

We've built AI-powered recommendation engines and verifiable-credential wallets. We also know when a boring rule fits better than a model.

Honest about trade-offs

We tell you what won't work, what scope means in time and cost, and where the risk lives. No magical thinking.