In July I started contracting at Algosoup as a forward deployed engineer. By September I had started my own company doing the same work. This is how that happened.
Algosoup
Algosoup is a small team of forward deployed engineers in London, started by Alex, Jack and Joakim. The job is to go into a company, sit with the people who actually have the problem, and build the AI system that fixes it inside their business, instead of selling them a product and leaving.
They were still at university when I joined. In their first few months they did around half a million dollars in revenue, worked with a £100m quant firm, and in August were named an OpenAI Select Partner. They did it without a big payroll. A lot of the engineering, mine included, was done by contractors brought in for a piece of work and paid for that piece of work.
The first thing I noticed was how little got written before something got built. Nobody wrote proposals. After a first call, someone would take a copy of the client's messiest real data, build a rough version over a couple of days, and the second meeting was that thing running on the client's own numbers. It is very hard to say no to something that already works on your data.
The other rule sounded mad to me at first. Before writing any code, whoever was on the job did the work by hand for a morning. If the task was reconciling trades, you sat at an analyst's desk and reconciled trades, slowly and badly, while they watched. You find out in three hours where the real mess is, and it is almost never where the brief said it would be.
Toasted Beans
None of this was completely new to me. Before Algosoup I ran Toasted Beans, which was a much more basic version of the same job. Instead of agentic systems it was websites and custom CRMs, mostly vibecoded, for law firms, accountants and anyone else who would pay.
The part I really learnt there was selling. I cold called, cold emailed, and walked into high street law firms and accountancies and asked for whoever ran the place. Most of them said no. One sale came from the dad of a kid at my school. Over about a year it added up to more than 15 businesses, 8 freelancers and £12k in revenue.
Not one of those accountants asked what the CRM was built with. What they asked was whether I would pick up the phone when it broke.
If they can do it
Watching Algosoup, what stuck with me was that nothing they were doing needed them to be older or to have a big team. They found clients, found engineers and delivered the work. I had already done the first part with Toasted Beans and the last part at Algosoup. So in September I started Arclight.
How Arclight works
Arclight runs on the same contract model that let Algosoup grow without a seven figure payroll. I do not hire engineers full time. I find them, mostly at hackathons and events around London. After an event I message the people who won, and I keep in touch with them. Right now there is a WhatsApp group with eight builders in it, and when a job comes in, the right person for it is usually already in there.
We sell in two places. One is London. The other is the Gulf.
Why the Gulf
My cousins Sami and Hamza live in Dubai, and they bring in work there for a commission. That is the part of Arclight that nobody else I know in London has.
Everyone selling AI services in London is going after the same companies. A bank in the City gets pitched agents constantly, and it already has an innovation team whose job is mostly to say not yet. Meanwhile there are thousands of companies across the UAE and the rest of the Gulf that want AI, can pay for it, and operate in countries whose governments are openly telling everyone to adopt it. The UAE has had a minister for AI since 2017. Very few people are actually walking in and selling it to them.
Where I think people get it wrong is on why those companies have not bought yet. It looks like being behind. I think a lot of them skipped a step. Plenty of serious businesses there run on WhatsApp, Excel and one person who knows where everything is, rather than fifteen years of enterprise software. That is a bad place to sell SaaS into and a very good place to put an agent. There is no old system to integrate with and no internal team protecting its dashboards, and the agent can sit where the work already happens, which is usually a group chat.
What we are building first
The first thing is agents that live inside the WhatsApp groups a company already runs on. They read the orders, quotes and photos that come through, put them into whatever system there is, and chase anything that has gone quiet.
The second is voice agents that answer the phone in Arabic and English. A lot of business in the Gulf still starts with someone ringing up, and a receptionist who is good in both languages all day is hard to find.
The third comes from Crewmate, which I built at a hackathon in August. Someone in the back office shows us a task once on their own screen, and we turn it into an agent that does it across every file, instead of spending weeks writing a spec for it.
The companies I want to start with are trading and distribution businesses, property brokerages, and family groups that own a bit of everything, because that is where the WhatsApp and Excel setup is most common, and where the person who can say yes is usually in the first meeting.
Where it is now
It is early. Arclight is me, part-time alongside Lumi, two cousins in Dubai and a group chat of engineers. But I have seen from the inside how a few students got to half a million dollars in a few months, and I have spent a year walking into businesses and asking for a yes. That felt like enough to start.