Software that is alive.
embry0 builds AI products that grow, breathe, and adapt — not artifacts that ship and rot. We carry an idea from a Notion doc to its first paying customer. Flat fee, small equity, written kill-switches. If we don't see life early enough, we both walk and you keep everything we built.
Most AI products are corpses on day one.
They ship as a v1 and never breathe again. The model freezes, the agents stop adapting, the prompts go stale, the schema rots, the evals fall behind. Within months the 'AI' is a static UI over a model that has been deprecated twice. The founder hired a contractor who delivered an artifact — not a product. The product is dead. Nobody told the founder.
We don't build artifacts. We build organisms: small, instrumented, designed to grow with the audience they're shipped to. The model swaps, the prompts evolve, the agents learn against real traffic, the evals keep pace with the frontier. The system stays alive after we are gone — that is the entire deliverable. The build is the easy part; the keep-it-alive scaffolding is the work.
Conception. Gestation. First breath.
- model—
- promptsdrafts
- evals—
- traffic0 req/d
- founderembedded
Conception
No fee. We sit with the founder, surface the assumptions hiding under the pitch, run a feasibility sketch, and decide if we're a fit. We may decline. If we agree, the build contract is co-signed with written kill-switches.
Gestation
Two senior engineers, one product designer, the founder embedded throughout. We ship a working product to a real audience early, instrument vital signs, and iterate against what we learn — not against what we assumed. Model rotation, prompt versioning, eval harness, and a founder-controlled kill-switch are wired in before the second user touches it.
First breath
You have a working product, a small group of paying customers, a vital-signs dashboard, the documentation, and a transition plan. We hand off to your next builder — your first engineering hire, a successor agency, a co-founder you found along the way — and step back to an advisor role. The system keeps breathing without us in the room.
Flat fee. Small equity. Real kill-switches.
We will not work for equity-only on first-time-founder ideas. We will not take preferred stock. We will not block your future round. The terms exist to make us partners, not parasites — and to make it cheaper for both of us to stop than to drag a dying product through three more sprints. Specifics are sized per engagement and named in the engagement letter, not on this page.
Idea-stage. Domain conviction. No technical co-founder yet.
What founders ask on the second call.
What does 'software that is alive' actually mean operationally?+
A product that ships with a vital-signs dashboard, a swappable model layer, a prompt-versioning system, an evaluation harness running against production traffic, a kill-switch under the founder's hand, and a hand-off plan documented from day one. The thesis is operational, not poetic — if the founder cannot keep it alive without us after we step back, we did not finish the job.
What if we want to stop early?+
You can. The conception phase is free. If at any point during conception or before the build contract is co-signed you want out, you walk with no obligation. We would rather lose the project early than carry a wrong fit.
Why equity? Isn't a flat fee enough?+
The equity is small and it is how we stay aligned on the right outcome. We're not optimizing for billable hours — we're optimizing for the product to keep breathing past us. A flat fee alone tempts us to ship and leave. The equity keeps us picking up the phone much later.
Who owns the code and the IP?+
You. Day one. The repository is in your organization from the first commit. embry0 holds no IP, no escrow, no licensed-back components. If you walk early, the code walks with you.
What if we already have one engineer?+
Welcome. Bring them. They embed with our team for the gestation and inherit the product at first breath. We've found this is the strongest hand-off pattern — the engineer who took over has been there the whole way.
Are you willing to sign an NDA before conception?+
Always. We sign yours or ours, whichever is faster. Most of our conception conversations happen under NDA. We don't pitch your idea to other founders. We don't pattern-match it to a portco. We don't tell it to investors.
What does your kill-switch actually look like in writing?+
A clause in the build contract that says: at named checkpoints, either party can terminate by written notice. The refund schedule is fixed in the contract. The founder retains all work product. We retain nothing — no equity, no claim, no carve-out. The clauses are short and unambiguous because they have to actually work.
Will you take an idea that's been worked on already by another firm?+
Yes, if you are willing to start fresh on the scope. We will not 'finish' a stalled build — that's what our sister studio Refire is for. embry0's range is the founder who has the conviction but not the artifact. If you already have the artifact, you probably want Refire or Smelt.
Tell us your idea.
We'll tell you if we can carry it.
Free two-week conception. NDA on the first call. We decline more than we accept — and we say so quickly.
alive@embry0.live