A boutique AI automation studio. Any industry, careful with every record.
Two founders in Arlington, Virginia who design, build, and run automation and custom software for businesses of every kind, with a specialty in work that touches regulated data: HIPAA in healthcare, FERPA in education. Small on purpose. Senior on every project.
Most automation firms will show you a demo. We show you the system running in production, the audit log behind it, and the number it moved.
Automation that survives contact with the real world.
We work across industries. We specialize in the regulated ones, healthcare and education, because that is where the stakes, the rules, and the wasted hours are all highest, and the discipline it takes carries into every other project we ship.
Automation for any team
Intake, billing reconciliation, scheduling, reporting, document handling, and the email that surrounds all of it. If your people repeat it fifty times a week, we can probably make it run itself, with a person still in charge. Clinics, law and accounting firms, universities, agencies, and growing businesses.
Our specialty: HIPAA and FERPA
Regulated data is where most automation shops stop and where we do our best work. Protected health information and student records stay inside your boundary, models see de-identified data or none at all, every automated action is logged and reviewable, and we sign the BAA before we touch a record.
The software around it
Websites, portals, internal tools, dashboards, and the integrations between the systems you already run: an EHR or SIS, a practice management or CRM platform, and your books. Built to fit how your team already works.
Four steps, in this order, every time.
This is the part that separates an automation that runs for years from one that gets switched off after a month.
Map the work. We sit with the people doing the task and count the minutes, the handoffs, and the exceptions before we write a line of code. Most automation fails because nobody did this part.
Design for the exception. Every automation has a human checkpoint where it matters: the refund over a limit, the referral that does not parse, the record that looks wrong. The system handles the ninety percent and hands you the ten.
Build inside your boundary. Sensitive data never leaves your environment. What reaches a model is stripped or synthetic, every call is logged with what went in and what came out, and access follows the principle of least privilege. This is the HIPAA and FERPA standard, and we apply it to everyone.
Run it in production. Monitoring, backups, audit trails, and the changes that show up in month two are part of the engagement, not an upsell. We keep running most of what we ship.
What you get that the other hundred AI automation shops do not.
We build software, not prompts.
Cardinal Hub, Apex Steward, Practice Ledger, and ApexAudit are production systems with databases, audit logs, and paying users. That is the standard your automation gets held to.
Security is the day job.
Seven years of higher education IT with a security focus, an NSA/DHS Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense on the resume, and the certifications to match. HIPAA and FERPA are not checkboxes we learned for the pitch.
Two people, no handoffs.
The people who scope your project design it, build it, test it, and answer the phone afterward. No account manager in between, no offshore bench, no surprise in month three.
Honest numbers.
We tell you what an automation will save before we build it and what it actually saved after. When the answer is that you do not need us, we say so.
Systems we designed, shipped, and still run.
A few of the things we built end to end. Every one is in production today.
Practice Ledger
SimplePractice to QuickBooks for a therapy practice, nightly, with patient data stripped before anything reaches a model. Zero PHI records sent to an AI.
Learn moreCardinal Hub
A booking, billing, and day-of-operations platform for a university conference center: dual pricing, five payment methods in one ledger, and a run of show board for every department.
Learn moreApex Steward
Identity governance tracking across NIST CSF, ISO 27001, SOC 2, SOX, HIPAA, and PCI DSS, with AI conflict detection against the vendor's own deployment guide.
Learn moreInbox Sentinel
Classifies and routes every inquiry that reaches our own mailboxes. We run it on ourselves so we know how it behaves at 2 a.m.
Learn moreYou are working with Russell and Jacob.
These are the two people doing the work, from the first call to the last deploy.
Russell
Russell comes at automation from security. Seven years inside a university IT organization, the kind that answers to auditors, FERPA, and a campus full of identities, taught him to ask where the data goes before asking what the software does. That is still the question he starts every project with.
He designs the systems and builds most of them himself, in TypeScript and Python: Cardinal Hub, Apex Steward, ApexAudit, and Practice Ledger, the healthcare billing automation that has never sent a record of protected health information to a model. His specialty is AI automation for regulated environments, healthcare and HIPAA first, education and FERPA alongside: the boundary a model can operate inside, the audit trail that proves it stayed there, and the human checkpoint that catches what it should not decide alone. He runs the client side from first call to architecture, so the person who scopes your project is the person who designs it.
russellakram.com
Jacob
Jacob has spent years in identity and access management: who can reach what, why, and how you prove it. That experience shapes Apex Steward and it shapes every automation we build, because an automation is only as safe as the access it is given. He is the one asking which account the system runs under and what happens when a person leaves.
He also owns the client relationship. Jacob runs the meetings, translates a team's day to day into requirements, and then tests every application flow end to end before a client sees it, so what lands in production is what was promised. His background is in business as much as technology, which is the point: automation only pays off when it fits how a team actually bills, schedules, and staffs, and Jacob is the bridge between the technical design and that reality.
We're based in Arlington. We serve the whole DMV.
Being local means we get your market, we're responsive, and we show up. We work with businesses throughout Arlington, DC, Northern Virginia, and Maryland who need someone that can handle both the creative side and the technical side.
Tell us what is eating your week.
A short call about the work your team repeats, what it costs, and whether it is worth automating. If it is not, we will say so.