A boutique senior AI engineering firm in Potomac, MD. We put working AI on real business workflows — measured against your baseline, monitored after launch, and owned entirely by you.
We founded ForthClover after watching too many promising AI projects die quietly — not because the ideas were bad, but because nobody measured anything. The demo impressed everyone, the invoice got paid, and six months later no one could say what had actually changed.
So we built the firm around a simple discipline: measure first, then build, then prove it. Your baseline is captured before we write a line of code. The success metric is agreed in writing. And every system ships with the monitoring to show it's still earning its keep in month six — not just on demo day.
We believe AI that works shouldn't require an enterprise budget, an 18-month timeline, or blind trust in a vendor. Fixed prices, published on the website. Code in your repo. Infrastructure in your cloud. Receipts with everything.
The Discipline
01Measure
Your baseline, captured before we write a line of code
02Build
Fixed price, with the success metric agreed in writing
03Prove
Monitored and reported against the baseline, month after month
Receipts with everything — if we can't measure it, we don't sell it.
Our leaders have spent their careers building ML and AI systems in production, and know what it takes to define business requirements, architect for profitability, and deploy a product your team actually relies on.
Founder & CEO
Ilya Rahkovsky, PhD is a senior machine learning, data science, and AI systems consultant who helps companies turn complex data into reliable models, workflows, and decision tools. His experience spans insurance-tech, biotech AI, scientific knowledge systems, economic research, graph and network analysis, statistical modeling, and production-oriented data engineering.
We're not here to solve a technical challenge and then disappear. We're committed to your long-term success. Think of us as the senior AI team you can call — without having to hire one. We stick around as you scale, and everything we build stays yours. When you win, we've done our job.
01
We practice what we preach. We build AI applications "with" AI. Combined with the production patterns we've refined across real deployments, you get results in weeks, not quarters. No six-month discovery phases. No endless RFPs.
02
Need a 14-day workflow pilot? A 30-day proof? A full production build with ongoing operations after launch? Every offer is fixed-price with a published number — you pick the rung that fits.
03
Whether you're running your first pilot or scaling to thousands of users, we right-size our team to your stage. No 'minimum retainer' requirements, no junior dilution as the work grows.
04
Deep experience across AWS, Azure, and GCP. We deploy inside your account, with your IAM, on your tooling — so you keep full control of cost, performance, and data.
05
We don't want another project — we want measurable ROI for your business. Every recommendation passes one test: does this make our client more profitable?
Engineering tailored to our business logic, not just ‘technical’ work.
From kickoff to closing, the engagement was high-energy and creative. The quality of the work reflects the collaboration, knowledge, and care the ForthClover team brings to the table.
The engineering talent isn't merely ‘technical’ — the solutions were tailored to our business logic and mindful of how our customers actually use the product.
Fede TorresTeam Lead, TrieveClient
Whether you're exploring AI possibilities or ready to scale to production, we'll help you navigate the path forward and identify the engagement that best fits your goals. If you're ready to build, let's talk.
