Agent engineering · PE-backed portcos

Working agents.
Not slide decks.

Tell us how your portco actually operates. We'll tell you where AI fits, where it doesn't, and build exactly what earns back the fee. Source code yours.

Operator-built · Production Python · MCP-native · 6-week delivery

0 wks
Discovery to production
0/7
Agent uptime
0%
Client-owned source
< 0s
Median response latency

Patterns

Where AI tends to fit

After enough discovery calls, these are where AI earns its fee most often. Your portco's answer might be one of them, all of them, or none. We figure that out on the call.

Labor replacement

Agents that do the work headcount currently does: inbox triage, research, CRM upkeep, drafting, document review. Humans supervise; agents operate.

Workflow compression

A deal review that took a junior two days collapses to four minutes. Multi-step ops loops that ran weekly become real-time.

Margin unlock

We target specific EBITDA drains in the portco: customer ops, deal admin, back-office reconciliation. We build the agent that removes them.

100-day plan execution

Post-close, time matters. We scope to fit the VCP sprint: an agent live inside 6 weeks, measurable before the next board.

MCP-native integration

Agents plug into Gmail, Outlook, HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Drive, SharePoint, Slack, Telegram. Whatever the portco runs on.

Code ownership

Source delivered at handoff. Agents run on infrastructure the portco controls. No lock-in, no hostage-taking, no vendor dependency.

Production case

Drake. Our own agent, running 24/7.

We built Drake to run our own deal operations. It's been running in production since Q1 2026. Shipped, not slide-deck.

Flagship product

Drake runs deal flow end to end.

24/7 inbox monitoring. HubSpot pipeline management. CIM scoring against investment criteria. Auto-drafted IOIs and LOIs. Personalized outreach at scale. A PDF daily digest each morning. Runs locally on the operator's machine, so data never leaves the operator's infrastructure.

Inbox watch
24/7
Response p50
< 1 min
Data locality
100%
drakeagent.com·Running in production since Q1 2026
Drake
Gmail
HubSpot
Slack
Outlook
Salesforce
Pipedrive
Drive
Telegram

Why us

An unusual stack for this work

Operator background, production engineering, and PE fluency in one shop. That combination is rare on purpose.

We listen first

Before we build anything, we listen. The first call is 20 minutes of you walking us through how your portco actually operates. Half the time what we learn on that call reshapes the proposed scope. We'd rather understand than pitch.

We ship code, not decks

Python agents. MCP-native integrations. Real systems running in production. If you want a slide deck about the future of AI, hire a consultancy. If you want an agent live next quarter, hire us.

We speak PE

Value creation plans. 100-day plans. EBITDA bridges. Dollar-weighted uplift tracked to basis points. Your IC understands what we're shipping because we scope in your language.

You own it

Source code delivered at the end of the engagement, with runbooks. No lock-in. If we part ways, the portco's agent keeps working.

How we work

Six weeks. One live agent.

Same shape every engagement. Scoped to the portco's operating cadence, not ours.

Week 1

Discovery

We shadow the target operation in the portco. Inbox, CRM, documents, meetings. Identify the EBITDA-adjacent workflow where an agent earns back its fee in the first year. Scoped proposal delivered end of week. Sometimes the honest answer is that AI isn't the right lever yet; when it isn't, we say so.

Weeks 2–5

Build

Agent developed against the portco's real systems. Weekly demos. Operator feedback loop. By week four you see the agent doing the job in staging.

Week 6

Deploy

Agent goes live on portco-controlled infrastructure: a laptop, Mac mini, or VPS they own. Source code handed over with runbooks and a control channel (Slack or Telegram). No vendor lock-in, ever.

Start a build

Tell us the workflow.
We'll tell you if it's an agent.

20-minute discovery call. You walk us through how your portco actually operates. We tell you where AI fits, where it doesn't, and whether it's this quarter's play or a later one. Sometimes the honest answer is: not yet.

Replies within one business day.

Or explore Drake first

We prefer to hear the workflow before we send a deck.