Smart IT Solutions
Real Business Results
In The Sky IT gives startups, small businesses and non-profits access to enterprise-grade technology expertise without hiring an enterprise IT department
TopRow AI
Manchester-base AI Startup
Who Are TopRow AI?
TopRow is a Manchester-based AI startup building a next-generation conversational AI platform called Smabouche. The product uses large language models to simulate realistic human interactions, letting users practise and prepare for high-stakes conversations in a safe environment.
TopRow came to In The Sky IT at a critical point in their development. The product had been validated in prototype and they needed to take it to production. The transition from something that works in a controlled environment to something that runs reliably at scale for real users is where many AI startups make expensive architectural mistakes. Getting it right the first time was the brief.
What We Delivered
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Cloud architecture design: We assessed the product's architecture and designed a cloud infrastructure capable of handling unpredictable user load without requiring a dedicated DevOps team to keep it running. The design prioritised reliability, cost efficiency and operational simplicity.
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Serverless infrastructure: We implemented a serverless deployment architecture that scales automatically with demand, so Smabouche handles traffic spikes without manual intervention and the team pays for what it uses rather than maintaining always-on capacity.
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CI/CD pipeline: We designed and built a full continuous integration and deployment pipeline, letting the TopRow development team ship updates quickly and confidently, with automated testing stages that catch issues before they reach production.
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Hosting environment: We configured and documented the full hosting environment and handed it over fully understood, with runbooks for common operational tasks so the team are not dependent on us to keep the lights on.
The Result
Smabouche runs in a live demo environment on infrastructure that scales with its user base and can be maintained by a small team without specialist DevOps resource. TopRow have continued to iterate on the product without infrastructure becoming a bottleneck.