Product design & engineering studio
Get your product built, not just planned.
Upnuvo is a senior product design and engineering team. We take you from a rough idea to a live, tested product your customers can actually use — in weeks, not quarters.
Teams we have built for
- PLLAY Labs
- HCN
- Gather
- Simera
- Asqme
- Maya
- Robbox
- Winegrower
- Savvly
- University of Piraeus
- Piraeus Bank Group Cultural Foundation
- Granicus
- StarX
What we do
Advice is easy to buy. Working software is not.
Upnuvo works like the product team you would hire if you had twelve months and a recruiter. We plug in at whatever stage you are at, take responsibility for delivery, and put something real in front of you at the end of every sprint.
Discovery and product strategy
We pressure-test the idea before anyone writes code: who it is for, what it has to do first, and what can safely wait. You come away with a scoped plan and a realistic budget, not a wishlist.
UX, UI and identity
Interfaces people understand without being trained, and a visual identity that makes a young company credible to serious buyers. Design decisions are argued from user behaviour, not taste.
Engineering and QA
Documented, tested code on a mainstream stack you can hire for. Built to be handed over, extended and audited by someone else — never a black box that only we understand.
AI and agentic UX
Assistants and agents that do real work inside the product: grounded in your own data, allowed to act where a person can review it, and measured so you know when a change made things worse. Not a chat box bolted onto the corner of the screen.
Launch, measure and iterate
We deploy it, instrument it, watch what real users do, then fix the three things that actually matter. Launch is the start of the interesting work, not the end of the project.
Not sure which of these you need?
Most people arrive with a mix. Tell us where you are and we will tell you what we would do first — and what we would leave until later.
How we work
A process built around deadlines, not meetings.
Every studio says it is agile. What matters is what you can hold us to. These are the commitments we make on every engagement, written into the way we work rather than into the contract.
Senior people only
Nobody learns the job on your budget. Everyone who touches your project has shipped and maintained production software before, and stays on the project from start to finish.
Two-week sprints, weekly demos
Every week you see the product running, not a progress report about it. If something is off track you find out in week one, while it is still cheap to change.
Scoped and priced in phases
We quote phase by phase against a scope we have agreed in writing, so you can budget properly, judge us on results, and stop the moment you have what you need.
A small number of clients
We deliberately cap how many projects run at once. It costs us revenue and it is the reason your project gets attention instead of a place in a queue.
You own all of it
Code, designs, infrastructure and third-party accounts sit in your organisation from day one. There is no licence to renew and nothing to buy back later.
Handover is the default
We document as we build so your first in-house engineer can pick it up without a rescue project. Plenty of clients keep us on afterwards — none of them have to.
AI in production
Most AI stalls between the demo and production.
Getting a model to do something clever takes an afternoon. Getting it to behave the same way for every customer, on your data, at a cost you can predict, is the actual project. We design the interaction, the architecture and the measurement together, because changing one without the others is where most AI work quietly falls apart.
Agentic UX
Software that takes actions on someone’s behalf needs a different interface to software that waits to be told. People have to see what is about to happen, keep the ability to stop it, and understand what was done while they were not watching. We design those moments — the confirmation, the undo, the plain record of what changed — because that is what decides whether anyone lets the agent do its job twice.
AI architecture
Underneath sits the part that decides whether any of it holds up: where your content lives and how it is retrieved, which step needs a large model and which needs none, what happens on a timeout or a bad answer, and what a single request costs you. We build that layer so the model is a component you can swap, not a dependency you are stuck with when a better one ships next quarter.
Evaluation and guardrails
“It seemed right when we tried it” is not a test, and it is the reason teams are afraid to change a prompt six months later. We build the set of real examples alongside the feature, so a change can be measured instead of debated, and add the unglamorous parts: permissions, spend limits, an audit trail, and a person in the loop wherever being wrong is expensive.
Have a pilot that never made it past the demo?
They usually stall for one of three reasons: the retrieval was never good enough, nobody agreed what a correct answer looks like, or the numbers only worked at demo traffic. Tell us what you have and we will tell you which one it is, and what we would rebuild rather than restart.
Capabilities
One team across the whole stack.
A real product needs a designer, a front-end engineer, someone at home in the database and the cloud, someone who knows where a model genuinely helps and where it only adds risk, and someone keeping the whole thing moving. You get that as one accountable team instead of assembling it yourself.
- Web applications, dashboards and customer portals
- iOS and Android apps, native or cross-platform
- APIs, third-party integrations and data pipelines
- Cloud infrastructure, deployment and monitoring
- AI features grounded in your own data, from retrieval to agent workflows
- Evaluation sets, spend and latency budgets, and audit trails for anything the AI does
- Marketing sites and content platforms that your team can edit
Tools we reach for
We pick boring, well-supported technology on purpose. It is easier to hire for, cheaper to run, and it will still be maintained in five years.
Track record
We have done this before.
Years of shipping products for founders and established companies, across a lot of industries and a lot of deadlines. The short version, in numbers.
40+
Products designed and shipped
16 yrs
Average experience across the team
9
Countries our clients operate from
100%
Of code and designs handed to the client
For established companies
Give your internal team the pace of a startup.
Established companies rarely lack budget or talent. What slows them down is a way of working that was designed for stability, not for shipping something new. We work inside your team, run the delivery, and leave the method behind when we go — including how to tell an AI feature worth building from one worth turning down.
Innovation projects that ship
The side project that has been on the roadmap for two years, taken from slide to production in a defined number of sprints, with a clear owner and a date.
Extra capacity, on your terms
Designers and engineers who work in your repositories, your tools and your standards. Useful in week one because we do not need managing.
AI pilots that survive review
Agent workflows built with the questions your security, legal and procurement teams will ask already answered — data residency, access control, spend limits and audit trails included, with results you can show a board.
Ways of working, transferred
Your people sit in the sprints, the demos and the decisions. By the end of the engagement the process is yours to run without us.
Questions
The things everyone asks first.
Anything not covered here, just ask. We would rather answer an awkward question early than discover a mismatch three weeks in.
How quickly can you start?
Usually within two to three weeks. Discovery work can often begin sooner, because it needs a smaller part of the team. If we cannot give your project the attention it needs, we will tell you that instead of taking the deposit and starting late.
What does a project cost?
It depends entirely on scope, so any number quoted before a conversation would be fiction. What we can promise is a written scope and a phase-by-phase price before you commit, so you are never asked to approve an open-ended budget. Most first phases are a matter of weeks rather than months.
Do you work fixed-price or per sprint?
Both, depending on how well defined the work is. Discovery and design phases suit a fixed price. Longer build phases usually work better per sprint, because the useful decisions change as real users get their hands on the product. We will recommend whichever protects you best.
Do we actually need AI in our product?
Sometimes the honest answer is no, and we would rather say so early. A well-designed form beats a feature that guesses wrong once a week and costs you support tickets. Where it does earn its place, we scope it like anything else: what it replaces, how you will know it is working, and what it costs per customer per month. Then we build the smallest version that settles the question.
Can you take over an AI feature that stalled?
Usually, yes. It is one of the more common reasons people call us. Pilots tend to stall in the same few places: retrieval that was never accurate enough on real documents, no agreed definition of a correct answer, or unit costs that only made sense at demo volume. We work out which of those it is before proposing anything, because two of the three are a rebuild of one layer rather than of the product.
Who owns the code and the designs?
You do, completely, from the first commit. Work happens in repositories and cloud accounts that belong to your company, and design files are shared with your team rather than kept in ours. There is nothing to license and nothing to buy back if you leave.
Can you work with our existing team and codebase?
Yes, and a good share of our work is exactly that. We start by reading the code and talking to whoever has been maintaining it, then agree how we split responsibility. We will be honest with you about what is worth keeping and what is costing you more to maintain than to replace.
What happens after launch?
Your choice. Some clients keep us on for a support and improvement retainer, some move to their own team using our documentation, and some come back for the next phase months later. We build for handover from day one so that the decision stays yours.
Where are you based, and does the time zone matter?
Upnuvo Ltd is registered in Limassol, Cyprus, and we work with clients across Europe, the UK and North America. In practice the time zone rarely matters, because progress is visible in a weekly demo and a shared board rather than in constant calls.
Ready to start?
Tell us what you are building.
One call, thirty minutes, no pitch deck. We will tell you what we would build first, roughly what that takes, and whether we are honestly the right team for it.