umFundi offers Rich Internet Application development, consultancy and interim management for start-ups and established software companies. umFundi works with online or technology-enabled businesses across all industries, and whilst we're based in the South East UK we've been helping companies as far away as Australia, South Africa and America. umFundi will draw together a team of high-tech industry specialists with proven experience focussed specifically on your engagement. We help investors, entrepreneurs and others requiring technical and management advice and assistance.

Start-ups

We engage with companies at any stage, although typically we will work before seed funding, assisting the business to either attract or capitalise on the funding. A lot of the start-ups we work with are in “stealth” mode and disclosure is heavily protected by NDA. Requirements often differ dramatically between companies, but we tend to work closely with founder-owners, assisting them to plan and achieve key milestones.

Many start-ups get caught out by technical consultancies, engaging them at a high capital rate to build their product, often with a dangerous “fixed-scope” brief or a punitive day-rate. Entrepreneurs are often drivers, and not all have the experience to assemble IT people to deliver a project rapidly and cost-effectively. We can help them embark on this process, recognising that a product idea often needs to be proved with an agile approach which minimises risk. Making mistakes can be part of the learning process that new businesses go through, but early, cost-effective, controlled experiments are wise.

Our initial engagement could range from delivery of a roadmap towards realisation of the company's goals, a cost or strategy review of the business plan, or arranging implementation of a development “sprint” on a proof-of-concept or prototype application to drive investment. Sometimes all that is required is a technically literate backup for presentations!

Established businesses

If you're struggling with the reliability of a critical application or web-site, delivery of a key IT project, the transformation of your technical resource or offering, our project rescue experience could be of use. We have worked on a number of £5M+ project rescues, turnarounds and restructures since 1998.

umFundi can enhance your IT capabilities from the ground-up, from making your implementation more agile with cultural, structural or capacity enhancements to guiding or augmenting your teams to achieve technical deliveries.

If your business is not aligned to take advantage of IT cost-saving, we can develop a roadmap to improve margins. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud computing pose opportunities for improvements in reliability and significant reductions in spend. If your business is not quite ready for SaaS, we can help you decrease costs on your infrastructure with consolidation, re-specification or tendering.

We have worked with a variety of companies from FTSE 100s to Mom and Dad cottage businesses.

Maintenance and support

umFundi can provide a variety of infrastructure services from remote server support through capacity monitoring , remote webmaster support, database services and application deployment. We can offer 24*7 support for single events or ongoing technical services and monitoring of your business critical application.

Concepts and Pilots

umFundi also builds “idea factory” businesses, developing concepts for exploration as business propositions.