About Clever AI Apps

A Small Studio
That Actually Ships

Most software never reaches anybody. We exist to close that gap — turning a specific, real problem into a product that is live, in someone's hands, and being used on a Tuesday morning.

How We Got Here

Clever AI Apps started the way most useful tools do — with somebody stuck. A construction manager losing his evenings to assembling progress reports. A leadership team coordinating through group chats and a shared spreadsheet nobody trusted. A household running its finances through a macro-laden workbook that only one person knew how to fix.

Each of those became an app. Not a prototype or a proof of concept — a real product, deployed, used daily, and maintained. Building them taught us the part that most software projects get wrong: the hard work is not the code, it is deciding precisely what the thing should do, and then being disciplined enough to ship a small version of it early instead of a perfect version never.

Today we build mobile apps and SaaS platforms for people who have that same kind of stuck. AI is part of almost everything we make, but it is a tool rather than the point — used where it genuinely does a job better, and kept out of the way everywhere else. Our own flagship, LCA, is live on the App Store and Google Play, which means we take our products through exactly the same gauntlet we would take yours through.

Who You Work With

Direct Access, No Layers

Two founders, and you talk to both of them. There is no account manager relaying messages, and nothing gets handed to a team you never meet.

Rafael Araujo — Co-Founder

Rafael Araujo

Co-Founder & CEO

Rafael holds a B.Eng. in Electrical Engineering from UNICAMP and an MBA with STEM Certification from Purdue University. A Senior Program Manager at Amazon, he led North America's first enterprise AI democratization initiative (the AI Champions Program), shipped RAG-powered systems that drove a 127% increase in policy retrieval, and built AI education frameworks reaching 90+ participants. He runs delivery here — scoping, sequencing and keeping releases on the date they were promised. Certifications include PMP (Project Management Institute) and Amazon AI Champion from Cornell University.

Marcus Cortez — Co-Founder

Marcus Cortez

Co-Founder & Lead Engineer

Marcus holds an MBA in Marketing and Analytics from BYU's Marriott School of Business (Eccles Scholar) and a B.E. in Civil Engineering. He spent years in product and analytics leadership — including a Product Line Manager role at Dell Technologies overseeing a portfolio worth hundreds of millions annually — before moving fully into building. He leads business intelligence for a US analytics agency by day and designs, engineers and ships the products behind Clever AI Apps: full-stack TypeScript, edge infrastructure, native mobile releases, and AI systems grounded in real data rather than demo-ware. Tableau Certified Data Analyst.

What We Value

How We Decide Things

Four rules that settle most arguments before they start.

Shipped Beats Perfect

A small release in front of a real user teaches you more in a week than a specification does in a month. We build in phases so there is always something to react to.

Mobile First, Genuinely

Not a desktop layout squeezed onto a phone. We design the small screen first, because that is where the work usually happens — standing up, one-handed, in a hurry.

Privacy Is Not a Feature

Scoping data per organization, keeping sessions revocable and keeping secrets out of the codebase are structural decisions made on day one, not a hardening pass bolted on before launch.

AI Only Where It Earns It

Deterministic rules run first; the model handles what rules genuinely cannot. It keeps behaviour predictable, keeps costs honest, and keeps us from selling you a feature that only impresses in a demo.

Let's Build Something

Bring us a problem, a rough idea, or a product that stalled halfway. The first conversation costs nothing.

Start a Project [email protected]