01
Web Development
Production web apps, platforms and marketing sites. Server-rendered, edge-deployed, and built to pass Core Web Vitals — not patched for them later.
Now booking Q3 engagements
Local & international
Software built with intent. Shipped with velocity.
A founder-led studio engineering web platforms, production AI systems, and data products for technical teams that need to move — without growing headcount.
95+Lighthouse target
2-weekSprint cadence
Founder-ledNo handoffs
About
Where two oceans converge.
Named after Cape Agulhas — the southernmost tip of Africa, where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet — our name marks the convergence of strategy, design, and engineering.
We partner with technical teams across Africa and beyond to design, build, and ship digital products of exceptional quality — engineered with precision, designed with intent, and built to scale.
Operating principle
“We don't sell AI hype — we sell measurable hours and rand saved. Every build is quoted in those units.”
The person you work with
Darrshan Govender
Founder · Senior AI Engineer
Builds production LLM systems — natural-language analytics, retrieval-augmented chatbots, multi-agent pipelines and test-time reasoning. The operating principle behind every build: treat AI like any other production system — structured outputs, eval-gated CI, guardrails by default, and full observability across cost and latency.
01
You get the engineer, not an account manager
The person in the pitch is the person in the repo — start to ship.
02
Evidence over promises
Open-source benchmarks and eval harnesses you can inspect on GitHub.
03
Durban-based, worldwide reach
GMT+2 — clean overlap with EU mornings and US afternoons.
Selected Builds
Production systems, not demos.
~94% accuracy01
InsightEngine
Natural-language-to-SQL analytics. Ask a question in plain English; get a governed query and an answer — with sqlglot AST guardrails so generated SQL can never run unsafe.
cited answers02
RAG Support Bot
Retrieval-augmented support with hybrid search and citation verification — every answer traces back to a source. CI eval-gated for faithfulness, recall@k, latency and cost.
ROC-AUC 0.8703
Churn & MRR Forecasting
An XGBoost churn classifier paired with Prophet revenue forecasting for SaaS clients — flagging at-risk accounts before they leave and projecting MRR with confidence bands.
92.5% on bench04
Thinking Loop
Five test-time reasoning strategies — chain-of-thought, self-consistency, decomposition, ToT-lite and direct — combined under an LLM adjudicator that picks the strongest answer.
Recall@10 0.4105
Hybrid Recommender
A content-plus-collaborative recommender that more than doubles baseline recall (0.41 vs 0.18) — relevant suggestions even for cold-start users with little history.
30–80% saved06
Semantic Cache
A semantic caching layer for LLM responses that recognises when two questions mean the same thing — cutting token spend 30–80% on real chatbot workloads.
Capabilities
What we deliver.
End-to-end digital capability — from strategy and design through to production-grade code and intelligent systems.
02
AI & Intelligent Systems
RAG chatbots, NL-to-SQL, agentic workflows and recommenders — built like production software with structured outputs, evals and observability.
03
Data & Analytics
Forecasting, churn modelling, pipelines and BI dashboards. Turn raw data into decisions — with models that ship and reporting that updates itself.
04
Product Design & UX
Research-driven design systems, prototypes and production interfaces — from brand identity through to motion and component libraries.
05
E-Commerce
High-converting stores with local payment integration, inventory and AI personalisation — tuned for the South African market and beyond.
06
Cloud & Infrastructure
Scalable deployments on AWS and Vercel — CI/CD, containerisation, monitoring and infrastructure-as-code, so what we ship stays up.
How We Work
From idea to launch.
A structured, transparent process that keeps you in the loop at every stage — no surprises, no long silences.
01
Discovery
We start with your business, your users and your goals. Workshops and research define the scope, technical requirements and the metrics we'll hold the work to.
02
Design
Wireframes, prototypes and polished UI that bring the vision to life. Every screen is reviewed with you before a single line of production code is written.
03
Develop
Production-grade code in two-week sprints, with live demos and a staging environment from week one. You see real progress every fortnight — not a big reveal at the end.
04
Launch & Support
We handle deployment, performance testing and go-live. After launch: monitoring, fixes and incremental features — and a clean handover whenever you want the keys.
95+
Lighthouse target
6+
Production AI systems
94%
NL→SQL accuracy
2-wk
Sprint cadence
Have something in mind? Let's make it real.
Start a projectCommon Questions
Things people ask.
How long does a typical project take?
Most engagements run 6–14 weeks. A focused marketing site can ship in 4 weeks; a full-stack product with AI features typically runs 10–14. You get a concrete timeline after Discovery, before any code is written.
What does an engagement cost?
Pricing is project-based, scoped to outcomes rather than hours. Smaller builds start around R60k; AI products and platforms are typically R150k–R600k+. You get a fixed quote after a 30-minute call — no surprises mid-project.
Who actually writes the code?
Founder-led — no offshoring, no junior handoffs. You work directly with the person designing and building your product. For larger engagements we bring in vetted senior partners we've worked with for years, never blind hires.
Do you work with clients outside South Africa?
Yes — across Africa, the UK and the US. We're GMT+2, with comfortable overlap for EU mornings and US afternoons. Async-first by default, with weekly live syncs.
Can you make AI useful for my business?
Probably — but only where it earns its place. We don't bolt chatbots onto homepages. Real wins look like automating manual back-office work, surfacing intelligence from your data, or agentic workflows that compound over time. We'll tell you honestly if AI isn't the right tool.
Get in Touch
Ready to build?
We partner with a limited number of clients each quarter so every project gets the focus it deserves. Web platform, AI product, or a complete digital build — tell us what you're making.
hello@agulhascode.co.za +27 79 866 1382
Durban, KwaZulu-Natal