Questions,
answered.

Corteus is a complete founding engineering team for one AI company at a time — a team of senior engineers and AI researchers with deep experience across banking, insurance, healthcare, and telecom. An investor or founder brings the thesis and the capital; Corteus builds the product, from first commit to production.

One partner with an AI thesis, committed capital, and no technical team — typically an investor, angel, or non-technical founder. We commit to exactly one product. We do not take short engagements, pilots, or staff augmentation.

The engineers stay anonymous because each currently holds a senior full-time role elsewhere; their identities are disclosed under NDA once a conversation is serious. The operation itself is not faceless: it is run by Aleksandar Zekovic, who is the public point of contact for every conversation.

A written technical assessment of your AI thesis: the architecture we would build, the team plan, an estimate of cost to first production deploy, and the three risks most likely to kill the product. Send the thesis through the form on the homepage; the memo comes back within five business days.

The AI Production Audit is a fixed-scope engineering audit of an AI system in production. Corteus examines cost, evals, provider exposure, failure points, and data provenance, then returns a written report with specific changes and pressure-testable ranges where numbers exist.

Corteus can provide a pre-investment technical read on an AI startup: unit economics, engineering reality, eval discipline, provider dependence, and production risk, written so the investor can challenge the findings.

An agency sells hours against a spec and rotates staff. Corteus takes founding-team economics on a single product and stays: the engineers who write the code are the engineers who run it in production. There is no junior layer and no handoff between build and run.

A venture studio typically takes 20 to 50 percent of the company at inception, which later investors often treat as dead weight on the cap table. Corteus has no studio entity: the team takes plain founder equity, the investor invests on standard terms, and there is nothing extracting a stake between the two.

Three phases. Two weeks of structured diligence on the thesis, with disagreements put in writing before either side commits. Eight weeks of immersion in the domain, building the evaluation set before the product. Then, at signing, the company becomes the team's only engagement: the full team joins as founders, full-time, and the engineers who design the system are the ones who run it in production.

As founding-team economics rather than a services contract — the structure is agreed per engagement with the capital partner. Ask for specifics in the first conversation.

LLM applications, AI agents, RAG systems, and fine-tuning pipelines on the AI side; full-stack web and mobile (TypeScript, Python, Go, React, native mobile) for product; AWS, Google Cloud, and Kubernetes for infrastructure. The stack is chosen per product, not the other way around.

Europe, remote-first, distributed across multiple countries. Engagements run in European and US time zones.