Crave Tech is a product engineering studio that uses AI to ship faster without dropping the bar. Decades of judgement, moving at AI speed.
Start a conversation →AI left unsupervised produces code that looks right and fails in ways nobody anticipated. The bug isn't in the syntax, it's in the reasoning. Experienced engineers driving it are the whole difference. We own every consequential decision, stay close to the code that counts, hold the architecture in our heads, and know what the model can't see.
The edge is judgement and process. The judgement comes from decades of engineering, the kind of time in the trenches that turns experience into instinct. You can't shortcut it. The process comes from years of building with AI, learning to wrap it in the correct structure so its output is predictable and consistent.
Before any code, we agree on what success actually looks like and what it's worth. From there we run it as tickets on a kanban board, so you can see exactly where things stand at any time.
Production-grade from the first commit: tested, secured, observable, and written to be understood. AI is what makes building it right this fast. A prototype is an option, never a required step.
Working software in your hands in weeks, not months. Small, continuous releases mean decisions ride on evidence, and value lands sooner.
Watch how it behaves with real load and real users, and sharpen it.
Fast delivery you can actually run in production.
// Throughout build, ship and improve. Regular progress reviews keep you in the loop and steering.
A NIST CSF 2.0 cybersecurity compliance SaaS, built and shipped end to end, from blank repo to production.
A cloud-connected touchscreen platform for New Zealand gaming venues. Offline-tolerant by design, so a dropped connection never stops the floor.
Modernising a gaming-room jackpot and hall-of-fame display platform, rebuilding an ageing system into something maintainable.
You've raised, the product is sharp in your head, and the one thing missing is someone senior enough to build it right the first time. A founding engineer at this stage is slow and expensive to hire; an agency hands you something you can't maintain.
So we take equity in place of part of our rate. You get founding-engineer depth at a fraction of the cash cost: the architecture, the first production system and the technical spine your eventual team inherits. We do this for only a handful of companies, because when we take equity we're betting alongside you.
It's one way to work with us, not the only one. Most of what we do is straightforward: you pay for the work, we build it. Angel engineering is there for funded teams who want a calibre of engineering that's hard to come by at any price, and would rather trade a slice of equity for it than settle for less.
We're a product engineering studio in Wellington: senior engineers who design, build and run software end to end.
Charles founded the studio on 20+ years of engineering leadership across New Zealand and North America. Everything we ship is built to that bar.
He was an early member of the Sharesies team, where he built the NZX/ASX market trading platform that sat behind their growth. High-stakes financial infrastructure where "looks plausible" isn't good enough.
Charles is an outstanding technologist with deep full-stack and lifecycle understanding, plus strong finance-domain knowledge. He helped design and build some of our most challenging services in record time.
Tell us what you're trying to ship, and we'll tell you plainly whether we're the right studio for it. No form, no funnel: email us directly and you'll hear back from the people who'd do the work.
