DEV.co
Richmond, VA · Custom Software + AI

Custom software for Richmond — built the AI-native way.

We pair senior engineers with an AI-accelerated delivery model to ship custom software for Richmond's financial-services, insurance, and state-government operators — without the fragile output that gives AI a bad name.

Senior-only engineering · AI-accelerated delivery · you own 100% of the code

AI changed the economics of custom software. We rebuilt our process around it.

Richmond anchors a strong financial-services, insurance, and government-tech market — home to Capital One, Markel, Genworth, Altria, and the Virginia state-agency ecosystem. Senior hires are six figures, months out, and picked over by Fortune-500 employers, state integrators, and the venture-backed challengers around them. AI changes the math, but only when senior people own the parts AI gets wrong.

On a Richmond financial-services, insurance, or govtech build, AI handles the repetitive 70% — schemas, scaffolding, CRUD, dashboards, glue. The 30% AI gets wrong is the part your bank examiner, state assessor, or compliance lead will absolutely catch: cardholder data accidentally landing in logs, accessibility regressions on a citizen-facing portal, claims-processing edge cases that fail at month-end, and integration with mainframe-era systems AI invents instead of reads. Raw AI output ships those silently.

We build for Richmond operators — financial-services and fintech tools at Capital One-adjacent scale, insurance and claims platforms, state-agency modernization projects, B2B SaaS shipping into mid-market and government buyers, and modernization of decades-old enterprise stacks. Our model: AI handles scaffolding and the repetitive 70%; a senior engineer owns architecture, security review, and signs off on every change.

Show, don't tell

AI writes the first draft. A senior engineer signs off.

Every change runs through review for security, tests, and architecture before it ships — that review is the product.

delivery.tstypescript
const draft = await ai.generate(spec)          // minutes, not daysreview(draft, { security: true, tests: true, architecture: true })// ✗ rejected: form lacks keyboard-trap-free focus management (Section 508 miss) → focus order + accessibility test// ✓ merged: PAN tokenized and scrubbed from logs, audit-logged authentication event with correlation id
Every change
AI velocity + human judgment
tests + security review built in
you own 100% of the result

On a Richmond financial-services or govtech build, the failure modes are accessibility regressions, cardholder data in logs, and missing auth audit trails. Senior review catches them before a 508 review, a QSA, or a state assessor does.

What we build for Richmond companies.

Fintech

Fintech & payments platforms

Customer-facing apps, ledgers, and risk pipelines for regulated, data-heavy products.

Insurance

Insurance & claims platforms

Underwriting tools, claims automation, and broker portals for carriers and InsurTechs.

Product

SaaS platforms

Multi-tenant products with auth, billing, and dashboards — MVP to scale.

Public Sector

GovTech & FedRAMP-ready apps

Citizen-facing services and internal systems built for procurement, accessibility, and audit.

AI

AI applications

Copilots, RAG, search, and agents grounded in your data, with guardrails and evals.

Internal

Internal tools & copilots

Operations tooling that replaces the spreadsheet-and-tribal-knowledge workflow.

Senior, on-shore, AI-accelerated

A senior team that moves at AI speed.

You work with senior engineers in Eastern Time who own architecture, regulated-environment quality, and accessibility — fitting into a West End fintech rhythm, a downtown Richmond enterprise cadence, or a state-agency procurement review — not a junior pool with raw AI output bolted on.

Richmond's senior engineering pool is concentrated around Capital One, Markel, Altria, and the state-agency ecosystem — three-to-six months to hire and quietly poached by remote DMV and coastal roles. An AI-native team gets you shipping this week, flexes monthly, and doesn't need a West End office.

Talk to an engineer

Traditional Richmond dev shop vs. AI-native.

Traditional AgencyDEV.co (AI-native)
Time to working softwareMonthsDays to weeks
CostFull senior rates, all hoursLower — AI removes the rote work
Code qualityGood (if senior)Same bar — every change reviewed
AI riskContained by senior review + tests
You own the codeUsuallyAlways — full repo on day one
Scales with youSlow to staff upFlex up or down monthly
2–3×
faster than traditional development
1 wk
to a working prototype
100%
code ownership at handoff
30 days
post-launch support included

Common questions from Richmond teams.

Do you work with Richmond companies?
Yes — we serve Richmond, Norfolk, and Washington, D.C. companies with senior, on-shore engineers in Eastern Time. Most collaboration is remote-first, with on-site available for kickoffs and key milestones.
Do you build to Section 508 / WCAG 2.2 AA for state-agency procurement?
Yes — accessibility is part of every component we ship, not an audit at the end. We test for keyboard, screen-reader, and reduced-motion scenarios as part of CI, extend your design system rather than creating one-offs, and produce VPATs (or VPAT-ready evidence) when procurement requires it.
Do you build for PCI-scoped fintech and insurance core systems?
Yes. We architect with PCI scope in mind from day one — tokenization, isolated data flows, audit trails — and we've built modern UIs and APIs on top of insurance core systems (Guidewire-adjacent and bespoke). We don't certify you; we build code your QSA or examiner can review without rework.
Is AI-built software production-ready?
Yes — when a senior engineer reviews every output, adds tests, and hardens it. The horror stories come from shipping raw AI code unsupervised. We don't, and we support what we ship.
Will we own the code?
100%, from day one. We deliver to a repository you control — no proprietary platform, no lock-in.
How fast can we start?
Usually within days. A short scoping call defines the build, the timeline, and a fixed quote.
Can you work with our existing team?
Yes — we augment in-house teams, review their work, and set standards, or run the build end to end. We flex to how you work.

Let's build it — Richmond.

Tell us what you're shipping. We'll give you a senior engineer's read, an honest timeline, a fixed quote, and tell you whether AI-native is the right fit for your build.