AI integration in Bengaluru
Almost every Bengaluru product team has shipped, or been asked to ship, a feature built on a language model. The demo was convincing. In production it meets Indian users, who type in Hinglish, switch between Kannada and English mid-sentence, and ask questions the prompt was never tested against. The feature is right often enough to stay live and wrong often enough that support has stopped trusting it.
We make these features dependable. First an evaluation set drawn from your real traffic, including the mixed-language inputs, so a prompt change can be measured rather than argued about. Then cost controls, because the provider bills in dollars and the feature is often priced to customers in rupees, caching where answers repeat, and a fallback for when the provider has an outage. On FM360, a weekly summary written by Claude runs in production, checked against a schema and replaced by templates when the API fails.
Bengaluru is where we live and work, so this page is less a pitch than a description of the market we see every week. The defining fact about it is that startups and global capability centres, the in-house engineering offices of foreign companies, are competing for the same engineers. A GCC can offer a larger salary, a guaranteed bonus and a stable employer. A Series A startup offers equity and a harder job. The engineer you want usually has more than one offer, a notice period to serve, and a counter-offer waiting. So the roadmap slips while the hiring plan catches up.
The companies that call us here come in a few recognisable shapes. Startups whose first backend was written by an engineer who has since left, often for one of those GCCs. SaaS companies built in Bengaluru and sold to customers in the US and Europe from the first year, now closing their first enterprise account and the feature list that comes with it. Deep tech teams in space, robotics, semiconductors and applied AI, where the core work is research or hardware and the software around it, the dashboards, device APIs and data pipelines, is nobody's job. And GCC leaders who need a working proof of concept before headquarters will approve the headcount to build the real thing.
What they need built is usually a defined piece rather than a whole product. A backend mapped, documented and made safe to change. Single sign-on, custom roles and tenant isolation for the enterprise deal. A device API and a dashboard for a robotics team whose engineers would rather be working on the robot. A proof of concept a GCC can demo to its parent company. We build those in your repository, in increments that ship, and write the architecture notes and runbooks as we go, so whoever you hire next can read them in their first week.
We share your time zone, so the working day is the same on both sides and a question asked in the morning is answered in the morning. Because we are in the same city, a kickoff or an architecture session can happen at your office rather than on a call. Most of the work still happens in writing, in your repository and your chat, because a decision written down survives the people who made it.
We are the right fit when you have a defined piece of work and want a senior engineer on it this month rather than after a hiring round. Start with a fixed-price two-week piece and judge us on what ships. We also cover the months before your next hire joins, and work white-label for Bengaluru agencies under your name.
Four ways this arrives.
A prompt that behaved on twenty hand-picked inputs meets ten thousand real ones. We build the evaluation set from your actual traffic first, so a change can be judged rather than argued about.
Usually a large context sent on every call, or a big model doing a job a small one can do. We measure where the tokens go before recommending anything.
Logging that captures the prompt, the retrieved context, the model version and the output, so a support question has an answer that is not a guess.
A fallback path, a timeout that is shorter than your user’s patience, and a degraded mode that is honest about being degraded.
A weekly maintenance pulse where Claude writes only the prose, checked against a JSON schema and a whitelist of numbers, with a template that takes over when the model fails.
Read the write-up →Asked by Bengaluru teams.
Can we meet in person?+
Yes. We are in Bengaluru, so a kickoff, a design review or a whiteboard session at your office is easy to arrange. We share your time zone, so calls happen inside your normal working day. Day to day we work in your tools, Slack, GitHub and Linear or whatever you already use, and you talk directly to the engineer writing the code. In-person time is best spent on the first architecture discussion and the handover.
Do you build for Bengaluru SaaS companies selling abroad?+
Yes, and it is one of the most common pieces of work we see here. We build what the first overseas enterprise customer asks for: single sign-on, custom roles, tenant isolation that holds under a missing filter, a log of who changed what, and billing through Stripe that copes with several currencies. The work happens inside your product, in increments that ship, so the deal keeps moving while the list gets shorter.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Bengaluru?+
PayScale puts a mid-career software engineer in Bengaluru at about ₹18 lakh a year. Our published rate is $35 an hour, with a $5,000 minimum. For that you get a senior engineer who writes the code, works in your Slack, GitHub and Linear, and starts within days, with no recruiting round, notice period or employment overhead. Begin with a fixed-price two-week piece at $2,800 and judge us on what ships.
We keep losing engineers to GCCs. How can you help?+
We add senior capacity while you rebuild the team. An engagement starts within days, so the roadmap keeps moving through the notice periods and counter-offers. We take a defined piece of work, ship it in your repository, and write the architecture notes and runbooks your next hire reads in their first week. The code belongs to you from the first commit, so picking it up later is a conversation, not a project.
Will you tell us if we do not need a model?+
Yes, and it happens often. Several requests we have taken turned out to be a search problem, a rules engine, or a form with better defaults. We would rather say that in week one than bill for a year of prompt tuning.
Whose API keys?+
Yours, in your accounts, with the spend visible to you. We never proxy your traffic through infrastructure we control.
What about our data going to a provider?+
We map exactly what leaves your systems and where it lands before anything is wired up. Where that is not acceptable, self-hosted open-weight models on your own hardware are a real option and we will price both.
Do you fine-tune?+
Rarely, and not as a first move. Retrieval and prompt structure fix most of what people bring to us as a fine-tuning problem, at a fraction of the cost and with none of the retraining treadmill.