About
I'm employee #1 and CTO at AutogenAI. I've owned the product architecture, the engineering organisation and the technical strategy since the first commit in July 2022.
AutogenAI builds LLM software for writing bids and proposals. We were live with our first customer in the autumn of 2022, on GPT-3 completions, six weeks before ChatGPT launched — and the architecture has survived four generations of model capability since, from retrieval and multi-model routing to evaluation tooling and agentic orchestration, without a rewrite. I took it from an empty repository through seed, Series A and a Series B co-led by Salesforce Ventures and Spark Capital, and built a team of forty across engineering, ML, product, platform, IT and compliance in the UK, US and Australia.
Our customers are organisations that win their work by bidding for it: defence primes, outsourcers and government-services firms, the large consultancies, transport and infrastructure operators, and social-purpose providers running frontline services. They buy software the way regulated organisations buy software, so a fair amount of my job has been the assurance work that lets them say yes — FedRAMP High authorisation in January 2026, on top of SOC 2, ISO 27001, IRAP, Cyber Essentials Plus and Defence Cyber Certification.
Before AutogenAI I was CTO at Policy in Practice, which sells welfare and benefits software, policy research and consultancy to local authorities, central government and the organisations delivering services for them. I built an in-house engineering team from nothing to take over from a departing outsourced supplier with no break in service, kept platforms serving tens of thousands of daily users healthy while the legacy systems underneath them were replaced, and recruited my own successor. Before that I was a Rails developer at Homeflow, and for six years I ran Nine Worlds, a 1,500-person residential convention I founded — brand, ticketing, e-commerce, operations, finance and a great deal of customer service.
The first part of my career was in welfare-to-work. I spent five years at a provider designing, marketing and running government-funded employment programmes and writing the bids that won them, and came back later as interim business development director. In between I founded Indus Delta, the sector's newsletter and online community, which I sold to Inclusion in 2010, and spent several years self-employed building Drupal sites and advising on web strategy and community.
I read Mathematics at Warwick and took an MSc in Computer Science at Birkbeck in 2022, by way of Makers Academy in 2015. Before all of it, two years with VSO teaching maths and physics in a locally run school in Central Africa — still the hardest job I have had.