About

An engineering firm, not an AI startup.

AinsworthLloyd has been building software since 2009, from Fairfax, Virginia at first and from Washington DC since 2021. The firm predates this wave of AI and expects to outlast the next one.

Founded: 2009
Base: Washington, DC
Practice: AI, software, platforms
Sectors: Federal, health, finance

We started as a software consultancy serving federal agencies and the organizations that work alongside them. That is a market with no tolerance for a system that only demos well: it has to pass a security review, an accessibility review, an audit, and then run for a decade while other people maintain it.

That shaped how we build. Architecture before code. A written record of every significant decision. Tests that pin behaviour down before it is changed. A handover that includes the keys, the runbook and an afternoon with your team.

AI did not change the standard, it raised what we can build to it. We now put models inside processes that carry real operational load, and we hold them to the same requirement as everything else: measurable, reversible, and honest about what it cannot do.

2009: Founded in Fairfax, Virginia
17: Years of continuous delivery
6: Regulated sectors served

Film

How we work, in a minute.

A short overview of the operations and technology practice: where an engagement starts, what we bring to it, and what changes by the end.

How we operate

Four things we will not trade away.

01
Say the inconvenient thing early
If the data does not support the brief, you hear it in the first fortnight, not the last. That conversation has cost us work and kept us clients.
02
Build for the people who come after
Someone else will maintain this. Decision records, runbooks and a domain model they can read are part of the deliverable, not an extra.
03
Measure, then argue
An evaluation set, a benchmark, a baseline. Opinions are cheap and we would rather show you the number.
04
No lock-in by design
Source, infrastructure and credentials are yours from the first commit. Any dependency on us should be one you chose.

History

Seventeen years of delivery.

2009
Founded in Fairfax, Virginia
A software consultancy built around federal delivery, where the review is the hard part.
2014
Enterprise platforms
Multi-tenant systems, identity and reporting for organizations with procurement departments.
2019
Data and machine learning
Forecasting and document understanding, on the same accountability standard as the rest.
2021
Domesticated to Washington DC
The entity moved across the river to the District, closer to the agencies it had been serving from Virginia for twelve years.
2023
AI systems practice
Retrieval, agents and vision inside operational processes, always with an evaluation set behind them.
2026
Our own products
AI Agents, a gateway to every leading model that assembles a team, quotes the work and verifies the result.

Sectors

Federal government
Defence
Healthcare
Financial services
Higher education
Transportation
Non profit
Technology

Where our engineers have delivered

Organizations our team has delivered into, directly or through partners. Client names and engagement outcomes are shared under NDA rather than published.