Financial services · Tier-1 bank
A claims triage agent that closed 41% of cases without a human.
Replaced a 60-person review queue with an evaluated agent pipeline. Same regulator, half the cost-per-case.
41%auto-closed
9.2mavg cycle
A consultancy, not a vendorEst. 2021 · London · New York · Mexico City
Ship the systems
your competitors
won’t build for years.
Crown·Banning is a senior team of staff engineers, ML researchers and product leads who embed with enterprise teams to design, build and operate AI-native software — from the first architecture review to the third quarter in production.
SOC 2 Type II
ISO 27001
HIPAA-ready engagements
$3.2B
client ARR managed in systems we've shipped
11 wks
median time from kickoff to first production release
94%
of engagements extended past the initial scope
38
staff+ engineers, researchers and design leads on the team
Trusted by engineering leaders at
NorthwindMERIDIAN·altheiaHalcyon&CoCONTOURPraxis·OSVerbatim
Practice areas
Six disciplines, one team.
No subcontractors, no offshoring,
no juniors learning on your dollar.
Every engagement is led by a partner and staffed entirely with senior practitioners. We don’t scale by adding bodies — we scale by being the right ones.
Read our staffing model01
AI Product Architecture
Reference architectures for retrieval, agents, evals and human-in-the-loop — written in your stack, not a deck.
4–8 weeksfrom $180k
02
Applied ML & Retrieval
Embedding pipelines, hybrid search, fine-tuned routers and eval harnesses — benchmarked against your golden set.
6–14 weeksfrom $260k
03
Platform & Reliability
SLOs, observability, cost governance and graceful degradation for systems that can't go down at 3am.
ongoingretainer
04
Data & Integration
Connect Salesforce, Workday, Snowflake and the long tail. Schemas you can actually reason about.
3–9 weeksfrom $140k
05
Security & Compliance
Threat modelling for AI systems, prompt-injection defence, audit trails, and evidence packages your auditors will sign.
4–10 weeksfrom $200k
06
Product & Design
Interfaces for non-deterministic systems — explainability, fallbacks, and the small interactions that make models feel trustworthy.
4–12 weeksfrom $160k
Selected work
Engagements we’re allowed to talk about.
Read
Industrial · Global manufacturer
Forecasting that survived three plant closures and a recall.
Probabilistic demand model with audit-grade lineage. We embedded for two quarters; the planning team owns it now.
$84Mworking capital freed
22%MAPE·90d
Healthcare · Multi-state provider
A clinical search index trusted by 11,000 clinicians.
Built on top of two legacy EHRs. PHI-safe retrieval, attestable citations, and an eval harness the medical board approved.
11kactive clinicians
98.7%recall @ 10
Stack & integrations
We meet you in the systems you already run.
Production deployments touching the platforms below, across 60+ engagements.
Snowflake
Databricks
Postgres
Salesforce
Workday
SAP
AWS
Azure
Google Cloud
Kubernetes
Temporal
Datadog
How we work
Seven steps, no surprises.
We don’t do discovery decks. The first week ships a real prototype on real data; every week after has a demo, a delta, and a decision.
1
Week 0
Calibration
Three-hour working session with your CTO and the team you'd staff. We agree on what we're not building.
2
Week 1
Spike
A working slice on real data in your environment. Ugly, but honest. Kills bad ideas early.
3
Weeks 2–3
Architecture
A written design doc your engineers will defend. Signed by both sides before code multiplies.
4
Weeks 3–8
Build
Pairs of senior engineers + your team. Trunk-based, evaluated, demoed Fridays.
5
Week 8–10
Harden
SLOs, on-call runbooks, evals in CI, cost guardrails, red-team. Before, not after, production.
6
Week 10+
Launch
Phased rollout with measurable success criteria, not vibes. We're on the pager.
7
Ongoing
Handover
We hand the keys back. A six-month optional retainer keeps a partner reachable, on a single Slack channel.
Why a small senior firm
Built for the work the big firms
don’t actually do.
We’re a deliberately small team. Here’s where that matters and where it doesn’t.
Crown·Banning | Global SI / Big 4 | Generalist dev shop | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Team composition | 100% senior staff & principal | Pyramid; 1 partner : 30 juniors | Mixed; rotating |
| Engagement size | 4–8 people, embedded | 40–200, layered | 2–6, staff aug |
| First production release | Median 11 weeks | 9–18 months | Varies |
| AI evals & safety in scope | Default, in CI | Separate workstream | Rare |
| On-call after launch | Yes, on the pager | Managed-service tier | Out of scope |
| Pricing model | Fixed-scope or weekly | T&M, change orders | T&M |
| Right call when… | It has to ship and it has to be right | You need 200 hands & a paper trail | You have the design, need the hands |
Principles
Six positions we won’t negotiate on.
These aren’t values posters. They’re the reasons we’ve walked away from work.
i.
A senior person owns the keyboard.
No code is written by someone we wouldn't put on your engineering bar.
ii.
Evaluated, or it didn't happen.
If we can't measure it on your data, we don't ship it. Evals live in CI from day one.
iii.
The dull bits are the work.
Schemas, logs, rate limits, retries, refunds. The interesting model is the easy part.
iv.
Write it down.
Design docs, ADRs, post-mortems. If a decision isn't written, it didn't happen either.
v.
Hand the keys back.
A successful engagement ends with your team confidently owning the system, including the parts they didn't write.
vi.
Refuse the wrong work.
If a problem can't be solved well, or shouldn't be solved at all, we say so — on day one, not week twelve.
Field notes
“They were three senior engineers and a partner. They replaced a 22-person workstream from a household-name firm and shipped a system our board now references by name. The most expensive people we've hired, and the cheapest engagement we've ever run.”
EM
Elena Marquez
Chief Technology Officer, Northwind Capital
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