01 · Northwind / About
Since 2021
Northwind exists to close the gap between “it works in a demo” and “it works in production, unattended, for months.” That gap is where most AI programmes quietly die.
2021
Founded
38
People
64
Systems in production
02 · How we started
Two infrastructure engineers, one recurring failure
Infrastructure
Document review
On site · planning
Operations desk
Enablement
Dana Whitfield and Marcus Oyelaran met keeping fraud models accurate under conditions nobody designed for.
Everywhere else, they watched promising pilots get a great demo and then stall, for want of a pipeline, a monitor or an owner.
In 2021 they started Northwind to own that gap. Not the demo. The system.
2021
Founded
64
Systems in production
82%
Clients who return
How we work
Toronto · Chicago · Denver · San Francisco
Every engagement is run by a lead and two or three engineers who stay with it from the first workshop to the handoff.
Design review, week two
Pairing on an evaluation set
The Toronto studio
03 · The record
2021 → 2026
’21
2021
Northwind starts with a single readiness assessment for a regional bank and a rule it still keeps: nothing gets built until the evaluation plan is written down.
Team
2
Systems in production
0
’22
2022
A document pipeline for an insurer goes live with monitoring on day one. Priya Nandakumar joins to build the data and MLOps practice behind it.
Team
9
Systems in production
7
’23
2023
The first multi-step agents ship with confidence-based handoff to people. The five-stage method gets written down after we watch one skipped stage cost a client a quarter.
Team
19
Systems in production
22
’24
2024
Jordan Achebe builds the Responsible AI team. Every engagement now includes a risk review, access logging and a governance playbook the client keeps.
Team
28
Systems in production
41
’26
2025 – 2026
Banks, insurers, health networks, logistics operators and advisory firms. Every system we have shipped is still in production, and still owned by someone on the client’s team.
Team
38
Systems in production
64
04 · What we believe
Held to in every engagement
Production is the deliverable
A system that impresses a steering committee and can’t survive a bad input hasn’t shipped anything. We build against production conditions from week one.
A human where mistakes are expensive
Agents and document pipelines route to a person when confidence is low. That isn’t a limitation; it’s the design.
Explain it or don’t ship it
Every output comes with a reason, a citation or a confidence score, not just an answer.
Ownership transfers, on purpose
We write the runbooks and train the team that will operate the system long after we leave. Dependency is not the business model.
No lock-in for its own sake
We build on the infrastructure you already run and pick tools for the workflow, never for a reseller margin.
Numbers, tracked honestly
We measure our own work the way we ask clients to: in production, against a baseline, month after month.
05 · What it’s added up to
Tracked the way we ask clients to
64
AI systems shipped to production
$41M
Measured annual savings and revenue
11 wks
Average kickoff to first deployment
38
People across North America
82%
Clients back within 12 months
99.95%
Average uptime, systems we operate
06 · Who you’ll work with
Every engagement is staffed by people who have shipped systems like yours before, not a rotating bench. These six lead delivery.
07 · For your risk and legal teams
Governance, built in
01
Data stays in your environment or a dedicated tenant, never pooled
02
Human review above a defined risk threshold
03
Model and data access logging, reviewed quarterly
04
Responsible-AI review led by Jordan Achebe’s team
05
Practices aligned to SOC 2 Type II
08 · In their words
Operators, not buyers
Renee Castellano
Meridian Trust Bank
Dr. Aaron Mbeki
Alderleaf Health Network
Lindsay Oduya
Cobalt Mutual Insurance
Tom Baptiste
Ferrovia Logistics
Whitney Sarr
Orinda Freight Co.
“
What sets Northwind apart isn’t any single system they’ve built for us — it’s that every one of them is still running, still accurate, and still owned by someone on our team a year later. That’s rarer than it should be in this industry.
Whitney Sarr
COO · Orinda Freight Co.
4 systems in production
Tell us what you’re getting
into production.
30 minutes, no deck. We’ll tell you honestly what it would take.