About Katemba
Who we are
Katemba was founded by senior engineers and consultants with long careers building software for organisations where it actually has to work: banks, insurers, regulated industries, public services. We came together around the observation that the generative-AI moment has changed what’s possible to ship and at what speed, but that almost no one is reorganising themselves around that change.
The traditional system integrators ship slowly. The new AI consultancies demo well and struggle to put things in production. Katemba is built to be neither.
The work spans a flagship delivery service - Governed AI Delivery - named vertical workbenches for credit-risk review and KYC & AML review, independent assurance, persona and knowledge engineering, platform enablement for in-house teams, and ongoing managed run.
Principles
Most software and AI projects don’t fail at the technology. They fail at the seams: at the data, the integration, the human handoffs, the governance, the running of it after launch. Experienced people see those seams before the build starts. That’s why we hire seniors.
The default trade-off - slow but solid, or fast but flimsy - comes from an older world of how software gets made. We’re built to do both.
Isolation enforced by the database. Personas versioned and evaluated. Audit logged from the first commit. Not features added in month nine to satisfy a security review, but how every system we build is structured from the first line of code.
Why it passes a security review →We’re builders. Strategy work that doesn’t lead to running software has a short half-life in this market. When we advise, we advise with the implementation in mind, and we’re happy to do the implementation.
We work on the stack that fits the problem. We’re not reselling someone else’s product, and we’ll tell you when an off-the-shelf option is the better answer than a build.
We measure ourselves on the operational metric the engagement was meant to move - cycle time, handle time, error rate, cost per case, NPS - and say so when we’re not moving it.
The team
Every engagement starts with a conversation with someone who has done the work - not a sales team.
How we work
We deliver in short, customer-led increments, not specifications, not slideware, not weighty documentation that no one reads. Every iteration produces something a stakeholder can use and react to.
AI-assisted delivery
AI-assisted engineering runs through every engagement. Senior engineers pair with frontier coding tools, so we ship more, faster, without giving up on the judgement that production systems need.
A small team of seniors, working on top of a hardened engineering foundation, with frontier tooling in hand, can be fast and enterprise-grade at once. That’s the whole proposition.
Sectors & geography
We work with clients across the United Kingdom, the rest of Europe and beyond, with on-site presence for discovery and key milestones, and a remote-first default for delivery.
Engagement models
Short, senior-led engagements to set strategy, prioritise opportunities and design target architectures.
Katemba leads the build, problem statement to production, against a defined outcome, scope and budget.
Experienced Katemba engineers and consultants embedded in your team. Senior hands on the parts that are stuck.
Platforms
We work across the landscape rather than reselling a single vendor. Selected platforms we have material experience with.
Tell us what you’re trying to move. If it isn’t our kind of problem, you’ll hear that on the first call.