London / Taipei / Ho Chi Minh City AI Systems People Use Est. 2025
Nativly · AI Systems
Selected Engagements 2024–26

Adoption is the constraint, not engineering. We build inside the tools your team already trusts, in the language they work in, and stay until the day runs on it.

Most AI pilots
never become systems.
Ours run daily.

4–6
Weeks to your first live system
01 The Problem

Why most AI projects never reach production.

You are not alone. Most organisations burn budget on proofs-of-concept that never become working systems. Four reasons it keeps happening.

01

Enterprise pricing, enterprise timelines

Big firms want a six-month discovery phase before you see anything real. By the time the slide deck lands, your team has moved on and the problem has changed shape.

02

No clear first move

You know AI matters, but it is rarely obvious where to start, how to scope it, or how to tell whether it is working.

03

Tools that sit outside the work

Standalone dashboards and chat links do not change behaviour. If it does not live in your CRM, your sheets and your ops tools, and in the language your team actually works in, it will not get used.

04

Plenty of noise, little delivery

The market is full of people who talk about AI but cannot ship it. Most advice does not survive contact with your real tools, data, and constraints.

02 Who It's For

Teams with no time for experiments.

We work with people who need working systems plugged into real revenue and operations, not another pilot.

i.

Founders & MDs who want AI that pays for itself

You own the P&L and have no patience for hype. You need practical systems that lighten the load and get used.

First system live in 4–6 weeks
ii.

Operations leads and overstretched CTOs

Your backlog is full and the team is small. You need a partner who can design, build, and own a scoped system end to end.

We plug into your stack, not replace it
iii.

Groups and investors operating across borders

You need live visibility across brands, markets and operators, in more than one language, without forcing everyone onto a single tool.

Built bilingual from the first screen
Connected by design
03 The Method

Three stages. Clear scope.

Concrete deliverables at every step. You always know what is coming next.

1

Map

We map your workflows, tools, and constraints, then identify two or three opportunities that will work inside your real systems. You leave with a complete system map and a build roadmap you can use with us or your own team.

1 week · remote
2

Build

Using the map, we design and ship the first working system, alongside your team or independently. A scoped, integration-ready build on the architecture we defined together. Not a pilot, but something your team can use on the day it lands.

4–6 weeks · fixed scope
3

Run

Once it is live we stay with it, holding the platform as it grows, adding systems as the business needs them, and keeping the whole thing accountable to the operators using it. This is where a first system becomes a platform, and where our longest work happens.

Ongoing · years, not weeks

The best systems disappear into the work. They become part of how the day runs, not another tool to manage.

Nativly · Razvan Burlacu & YJ Chen
04 Selected Work

Systems we have shipped.

Not prototypes. Practical systems built around real constraints and real teams.

Platform · Retail

SNIP · Store Network Intelligence Platform

A mini-ERP for a multi-brand menswear retailer's 105+ store estate: eight systems sharing one data spine, one store master and one access model. SNIP pulls a fragmented archive of spreadsheets, scanned PDF leases and BigQuery views into a single platform, then runs the retailer's own machine learning on top of it: forecasting, allocation, pricing and customer models, every one of them trained locally on their data.

105+
stores on one live, multi-layer national map
8 systems
modules on one shared data spine and access model
Bilingual
fully localized operator UI, local language & English
12 models
trained locally on client hardware, retrained every week

How it fits together

  • One store master, one customer key and one sell-through definition are shared by every module, so two boards can never quietly disagree about the same garment.
  • All model training runs locally on the client's own hardware; only results are loaded to the cloud, which keeps a platform of this size inside a small monthly cloud bill.
  • Every module is gated by the same capability-tagged access model, so a new role or a new market is a configuration change rather than a rebuild.
  • Recommendations carry deadlines and an accept-or-dismiss trail, and every change to an engine rule is logged with what it retires, so the platform's advice is auditable rather than merely generated.

Shared stack

Frontend · Next.js 14 · Tailwind · Mapbox GL
Backend · Node 20 / TypeScript · Express · Prisma
Data · Postgres · BigQuery · DuckDB · node-cron ETL
Machine learning · Python · LightGBM · OR-Tools
Intelligence · Document AI · Vertex Gemini
Cloud · Google Cloud Run · Cloud Build · Firebase Auth (SSO)
Platform modules
P1
SNIP Platform · Estate & Contracts

Estate & Lease Intelligence

Every store, lease and landlord on one live map, with a decision engine that turns estate signals into dated actions and an OCR pipeline that reads the scanned contracts underneath them.

Mapbox · Document AI · Decision engine

Capabilities

  • Red, amber and green store flags become recommended actions (consider non-renewal, open negotiation now, re-paper lease), each with a deadline and an accept-or-dismiss audit trail.
  • A lease-runway view tracks every contract through its T-180, T-90 and T-30 negotiation windows, so no renewal arrives unannounced.
  • OCR reads scanned foreign-language leases, renders the key facts into English, clusters multi-document packages, and routes every file through review-before-approve.

Stack

Frontend · Next.js 14 · Mapbox GL multi-layer mapping
Intelligence · Document AI · Vertex Gemini · foreign-language OCR
Data · Postgres · contract, landlord and store master
Controls · Review-before-approve ingestion · decision audit trail
P2
SNIP Platform · Forecasting

Demand Forecasting, Style to Size

A four-week demand forecast for every store and style, decomposed down to size, retrained locally each week on the retailer's own trading history.

LightGBM · Quantile heads · Size curves

Capabilities

  • Gradient-boosted models carry p50 and p90 quantile heads, so allocation can be planned against a confident upper bound rather than a single point estimate.
  • The local holiday calendar is a top-three feature, and stockout weeks are down-weighted so absent stock is never read as absent demand.
  • A learned size curve decomposes each style forecast to store-SKU level and sums back exactly, giving allocation a size-aware target.

Stack

Models · Python · LightGBM · p50 / p90 quantile regression
Features · Local holiday calendar · stockout proxy · price-level markdown
Data · DuckDB · BigQuery extract · weekly stock snapshots
Run · Local weekly training under a memory-capped scheduler
P3
SNIP Platform · Allocation

Freight-Costed Transfer Optimisation

A network-wide optimiser that moves stock to where it will actually sell, priced against the retailer's real courier rate card rather than a flat per-unit assumption.

OR-Tools · Min-cost flow · Freight-aware

Capabilities

  • Per-style min-cost flow across the whole estate, consolidated into shippable lanes, with every lane tested against its billed freight including head charge and weight floor. The same data always gives the same plan.
  • Transit times are learned from the retailer's own dispatch and receipt records and discount each lane's benefit, so slow routes stop winning on distance alone.
  • Operational gates encode how the team actually works: a minimum move size, brand fit for the receiving store, a donor never giving its last unit, and stock clocks anchored on arrival rather than last sale. When nothing clears those gates, the board says so and lists the rules rather than inventing moves.
  • Executed transfers are read back from the source system, so every recommendation can be scored against what genuinely moved.
  • A monthly planner rebuilds the regional managers' own transfer round (their rule, plus a check that the receiving store actually sells the style) and exports it in the exact spreadsheet layout they already work from.

Stack

Optimisation · Python · OR-Tools min-cost flow · lane consolidation
Costing · Real courier rate card · tiered distance bands
Learning · Transit lanes matched from dispatch and receipt records
Surfaces · Lane board with per-size lines · monthly planner with spreadsheet export · execution feedback loop
P4
SNIP Platform · Pricing

Markdown & Price Optimisation

A clearance engine that decides how deep to mark a garment down, or whether to move it instead. It runs separately from transfers, so the two never fight over the same stock.

Elasticity · Legal ceiling · Campaign holds

Capabilities

  • Category-pooled price elasticity with shrinkage gives a stable ranking of what responds to discount, used for direction rather than false precision.
  • Every recommendation is cost-floored and coordinated with the transfer plan, returning either a markdown depth or a ship-it instruction.
  • Campaign holds keep a promotion and a markdown off the same garment, and the board declares what it is holding back instead of silently dropping it.
  • The local legal cap on promotional discounts is enforced in the optimiser, the campaign editor and the data loader alike, and the board says when it is the law, not the model, that stops a garment clearing.

Stack

Models · Python · category-pooled elasticity with shrinkage
Optimisation · Cost-floored clearance depth · transfer coordination
Data · Price levels · network sell-through · stock age
Controls · Legal discount ceiling in optimiser, editor and loader
Surfaces · Markdown board with bilingual recommendation badges
P5
SNIP Platform · Customers

Customer Intelligence & Promotions

Churn, lifetime value and win-back across a national customer base, plus a promotion panel that scores each campaign against comparable past events rather than its headline discount.

Churn AUC 0.87 · CLV · Promo benchmarks

Capabilities

  • Point-in-time feature panels with a strict temporal split, walk-forward backtested; churn reaches 0.87 AUC with 5.3× lift in the top decile.
  • Lifetime value is modelled on a Tweedie objective, producing a usable spread across deciles instead of a flat average nobody can act on.
  • Only governance-safe aggregates reach the application database; a named win-back list is produced on demand through an existing audited export path.

Stack

Models · LightGBM binary churn · LightGBM Tweedie lifetime value
Validation · Walk-forward backtest · probability calibration
Governance · Aggregates only in-app · audited on-demand export
Surfaces · Segment board · cohort retention · promotion results
P6
SNIP Platform · Merchandising

Sell-Out Workbooks & Returns

The buying team's real analysis tool, moved inside the platform. They keep their own definitions, the numbers underneath refresh themselves overnight, and every return now arrives with the reason given at the till.

Two-way sync · Team definitions · Return reasons

Capabilities

  • The team's existing workbook structure and definitions are preserved, so adoption costs nothing and nobody is asked to relearn their own analysis.
  • A nightly sync picks up whatever they re-saved and refreshes the figures beneath it, with a heartbeat that proves the run actually happened.
  • Sell-through is computed once, centrally, and reused by the markdown and transfer engines, so the same garment is never two different numbers.
  • Returns and exchanges carry the reason recorded at the till, matched line by line to the sales record and reconciled exactly to reported return revenue, with product photos beside the style codes.

Stack

Data · Nightly two-way sync · one shared sell-through definition
Backend · Node 20 / TypeScript · Prisma · Postgres
Returns · Till return reasons · nightly pairing to sales lines
Surfaces · In-app workbooks owned by the merchandising team
Controls · Sync heartbeat and receipt status
P7
SNIP Platform · Performance

Targets, Pace & Store Lifecycle

A fair read on whether a store is genuinely behind: pace-adjusted, renovation-aware, and honest about new stores that are still ramping.

Pace clock · Target approval · Renovation-aware

Capabilities

  • Pace-to-target scores each store against where it should be today rather than against the month total, with the clock stopping at the last complete sales day instead of drifting ahead of the data.
  • A "Four Wall" ramp view judges new stores against a maturity curve, and a renovation-aware lifecycle means a refit never reads as decline.
  • Targets come from the business's own workbook with no assumed uplift. A revision goes to an executive to approve or send back with a reason, so only approved figures ever reach the pace clock, and a closed-month review page gives every manager the same comparison basis.
  • A deliberately lenient scout form lets field staff file a new site from a phone, tolerating how people really type numbers, and scores it on the conditions they judge sites by on the ground: flooding, parking, street visibility and road layout.

Stack

Backend · Node 20 / TypeScript · Prisma · Postgres
Logic · Pace clock · maturity curves · renovation periods
Inputs · Checked target-workbook upload · approval desk · mobile scout form
Surfaces · Month results · Four Wall ramp · openings pipeline
P8
SNIP Platform · Operations

Access, Reliability & Self-Healing

The part nobody asks for and everybody needs: who can see what, whether the data actually arrived, and what happens at three in the morning when it did not.

RBAC · Freshness sentinel · Self-heal

Capabilities

  • Five-tier role-based access with financial masking, gated on capability tags rather than hardcoded roles, so granting a new role never requires a code change to stay safe.
  • A freshness sentinel watches every feed against its own expected window, and tells a late run apart from a stopped one instead of crying wolf.
  • When a job fails the platform re-runs it once before telling anyone, and emails a named owner only if the retry fails too.
  • Anyone can report a problem from the screen they are on, with up to five pictures, and the email that closes it shows them the fix.
  • Fully bilingual throughout, down to the alert emails and the morning digest of new flags and lease-window crossings.

Stack

Auth · Firebase SSO · tag-gated RBAC · financial masking
Reliability · Freshness sentinel · single-retry self-heal · alert email
Cloud · Google Cloud Run · Cloud Build CI · node-cron ETL
Localization · Full bilingual interface, digests and alerts
Further engagements
01
Retail · Enablement

SNIP Tutor · Bilingual Voice Agent

A voice agent that teaches a production ML system to the people who depend on it, answering out loud in Vietnamese or English, so every question about a model stops routing through one person.

Voice · Grounded retrieval · Bilingual

Capabilities

  • Answers strictly from a curated knowledge base of twelve model cards; where it cannot, it says so and names who to ask.
  • Speaks a short summary aloud, then puts the formula, constants and a worked example on screen, because you cannot read an equation out loud.
  • Logs every question it could not answer, so the knowledge base grows from real gaps rather than guesswork.

Stack

Frontend · Static web app · browser mic · KaTeX
Intelligence · Claude Sonnet · prompt-cached knowledge base
Voice · Google Cloud Text-to-Speech (Chirp 3 HD)
Cloud · Cloudflare Workers · KV gap log
02
Investment Firm

Cross-Vertical GCP Data Platform

A cloud data platform giving a multi-market investment firm one live view across every portfolio company.

BigQuery · dbt · Metabase · Chatbot

Capabilities

  • Migrates fragmented on-prem data into BigQuery with dbt modelling.
  • Surfaces portfolio health through Metabase vision-board dashboards.
  • Natural-language chatbot lets the team query everything instantly.

Stack

Data · BigQuery · dbt
Surfaces · Metabase dashboards
Intelligence · Natural-language query chatbot
Cloud · Google Cloud Platform
03
Retail

UK Market GTM Readiness AI

An AI go-to-market engine that scores a retail brand's UK launch readiness and shows exactly what to fix first.

Pitch deck · Web scrape · UK GTM

Capabilities

  • Ingests pitch deck and website to understand the offer automatically.
  • Scores positioning, ICP fit, and category risk for the UK retail market.
  • Outputs a prioritised GTM action list ready for immediate execution.

Stack

Ingestion · Web scraping · Pitch-deck & PDF parsing
Intelligence · LLM scoring · Retrieval
Output · Python · Automated action report
04
Product · Workshops & Events

Echo Room · AI Decision Environment

A mobile-first platform where teams work through complex tradeoffs, vote on structured options with justifications, and leave with a decision map instead of slides.

PWA · AI Generation · Decision Maps

Capabilities

  • Turns an organiser's short brief into structured quests, decisions and options automatically.
  • Teams of three move through sequential decision points, voting with written justifications.
  • Generates a shareable decision map documenting every choice, tradeoff and commitment.

Stack

Frontend · Next.js 14 · Tailwind · PWA (offline)
Backend · TypeScript · Prisma · Zod
Data · Postgres · Redis rate limiting
Intelligence · OpenAI quest generation
Cloud · Vercel serverless
05 The Team

The people who built it.

Both founders are builders. The systems on this page were designed and written by the people whose names are on them.

YJ Chen
Strategy & Build

YJ Chen

Founder

Group Transformation Director at a multi-sector investment and operating group, where he designed and built the retail platform that now runs daily across more than a hundred stores, including the demand models, the transfer optimiser and the lease engine. Before that, six years building and running an immersive-entertainment venue in London, ranked the city's number-one games and entertainment centre, and a retail-technology business he took into eight Asian markets, whose virtual try-on was independently found by Kellogg and Tuck researchers to lift sales per visitor by 22%. Co-lead of Tech London Advocates Taiwan. A BSI-certified Lead Implementer of ISO/IEC 42001, the international standard for managing AI. London Business School MBA and a master's in Industrial and Operations Engineering from the University of Michigan. Works in English, Mandarin and Taiwanese.

Razvan Burlacu
Design & Systems

Razvan Burlacu

Co-Founder

Senior Creative Technologist and AI Transformation Lead at Wirestock, currently turning a multi-million-dollar international company into an agentic-AI dataset business. That work has included establishing a reinforcement-learning operation from scratch, training a team of more than twenty and building the capability for the wider company to adopt an entirely new discipline. Before that, Head of Technology and Creative Technologist at Hyper Reality, responsible for the engineering and real-time systems behind a busy London immersive venue operating at 99% uptime. A BA in New Media from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Torino established the fine-arts foundations of a practice now spanning creative direction, prototyping, software architecture and infrastructure. The collaboration with YJ dates back to Hyper Reality and includes the early architecture of the retail platform that became Nativly's flagship. The approach starts with understanding the business problem, finding the most direct path to a solution and building systems that survive contact with environments they did not design.

06 FAQ

Common questions.

What happens on the first call?

We map two or three concrete opportunities where AI can help, based on your current tools and workflows. No homework required: you bring context, we bring structure.


What if we are not ready for AI?

Most teams feel that way. As long as you have some digital workflows (Sheets, CRMs, ERPs, dashboards), there is usually a sensible starting point.

A scoped, working system wired into your tools, plus a short enablement session for your team. You keep the system and the documentation, whether or not we continue together. Most clients do continue. That is the Run stage, and it is where platforms get built.
No. We are stack-agnostic. Recent work spans GCP (BigQuery, dbt, Metabase), custom web apps, and stacks built around Google Sheets, Notion, and CRMs. The right stack is the one your team will use.
We work within your existing security model: VPNs, SSO, service accounts, and least-privilege access. We agree access levels up front and can work with your IT or security partner where needed.
We run strategy and architecture engagements, but our bias is towards systems that ship. If you are not ready for a build, we design a roadmap your team or existing partners can execute.
Get Started

Ready to explore a real use-case?

Tell us what you are trying to make work. We will come back with two or three concrete opportunities, and say honestly if now is not the right time.