A founder-led AI practice. Not an agency.
Norstride Inc. has been an independent software practice since 2012. Our current focus — AI engineering for startups — emerged from a specific pattern we kept seeing: founders who needed AI features live in their products in eight weeks and a hiring funnel that took six months. We sit in that gap.
Who we are
Wash Candido
Founder & Principal Engineer
Wash Candido founded Norstride to do one thing well: build and ship production AI features for startup teams. The pattern that kept showing up was the same — founders had a feature they needed live in eight weeks and a hiring funnel that took six months. Norstride exists to close that gap.
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Today Norstride is a founder-led practice. Engagements that need additional engineers run with vetted senior contractors brought in for the duration of the project. Every line of code that ships is reviewed by Wash before merge.
Five things we believe about shipping AI.
- 01
Speed is a strategy, not a vibe.
Most startups lose to a competitor that shipped a worse version of the same feature six months earlier. Time-to-production is the metric we optimize first. Quality is non-negotiable, but we believe both can be true.
- 02
Engineering, not theater.
No "AI strategy decks." No prompt-wrapper demos that fall apart in week three. Every engagement produces production code, evals, monitoring, and a written runbook. Our deliverable is software that runs.
- 03
Evals before features.
We will not ship an AI feature without an offline evaluation harness. If we cannot measure whether the model is doing the right thing, neither can your team after we're gone. Evals are the first thing we write and the last thing we hand off.
- 04
The team that ships is the team that maintains.
We write code your team will inherit. That means standard tooling, real tests, documentation that someone other than us can read, and a one-week handoff at the end of every engagement. No vendor lock-in. No black boxes.
- 05
We say no.
We turn down work that's a bad fit. If the feature doesn't make sense, if the timeline is unrealistic, or if the underlying problem isn't actually an AI problem, we'll tell you on the first call.
How we're set up
Norstride is an independent, privately held company. We are not VC-backed. We do not take referral fees from cloud or model vendors. Every engagement is direct between you and us — no third-party brokers, no resellers.
Legal entity, address, D-U-N-S, and contact details are in the footer of every page.
Want to see if we're a fit?
A 20-minute call. We'll tell you on the call whether the project is the right shape for us.