An engineering firm for the physical world.
AEC, construction, robotics, and manufacturing run on constraints most software teams never have to respect. Our engineers are as fluent in AI and code as they are in structural mechanics, fabrication, and construction means and methods.
We move technology both directions.
We embed inside the companies that make physical things: early-stage tech startups pushing the frontier, and established AEC firms, contractors, robotics companies, and manufacturers modernizing how they design, coordinate, and build.
The speed and ambition of startups, into firms with decades of domain depth.
Established firms and contractors have the projects, the codes, and the field knowledge. What they often lack is a team that ships weekly and knows when a model is wrong. We bring that inside.
That depth, back into the products startups are racing to build.
Tech startups move fast on problems the industry has fought over for decades. Speed only wins if it is pointed at the right problem. We bring the industry experience that gets you there first, and keeps you from building something the market will not buy.
Three ways we embed.
Not a vendor relationship. We work in your repos, your standups, and your deadlines.
Forward-deployed engineers
Individual engineers who write production code and understand the industry they are building for. They join your team and work to your roadmap.
Embedded product teams
A standing team of product, engineering, and design that takes a problem you have not yet specified and returns a system running in production.
Fractional CTO
Technical leadership before a full-time executive makes sense. The scope is the whole technology function, not one system.
Systems built and shipped.
From government-funded R&D to production software running on active job sites.
Design review is a gate at the end. We moved it into the drawing.
Defense · Agentic AI · Program lead · ActiveRead the case study →Military construction review happens after the fact. We serve as principal investigator on the federal program behind an agentic system that encodes national and defense construction codes as a queryable knowledge graph and checks a live building model against them while the architect is still drawing.
Most CAD files record a finished shape. This one records the intent that produced it.
Deep tech · Embedded architect · ActiveRead the case study →A company rebuilding CAD from first principles, with geometry written as differentiable fields. Embedded with their engineers, we make the calls on the schema and versioning contract for the core format, the architecture of the platform around it, and what the representation should be able to express next.
The gate cannot live in the application.
Civil infrastructure · Embedded team · In buildRead the case study →For a utility contractor, regulatory clearance gates throughput, not digging. We are building the system that replaces paper with a scheduling gate enforced in the database, so there is no path through the software that can schedule an uncleared dig.
Tarek El-Afifi
Led product and engineering at ICON, building the software organization behind the platform that powered over 200 robotically-built homes. Before that, an engineer at Arup and Walter P Moore. Graduate degrees in AI, computer science, and structural engineering.
More about Tarek →