We started LumenHarbor because we kept meeting founders who had been sold the wrong thing
During Covid we watched non-technical founders pay for software they could not evaluate, from people who would not be there when it broke.
How we got here
I came to the UK in 2017 for an MSc at Lancaster University and stayed. Through Covid I did a lot of contract work for small businesses that were suddenly, urgently digital. The pattern repeated: a founder with a real business problem, a vendor who sold them something adjacent to it, and nobody left holding the outcome.
LumenHarbor started as my answer to that. It is now a UK company built on the Innovator Founder visa, and we have worked with 28+ startups and SMEs since 2020. I am also Entrepreneur in Residence at Lancaster University.
We build and operate our own software as well. Garchi CMS is the flagship, an agent-native headless CMS with its own MCP server. This website runs on it. That matters because it keeps us honest: everything we recommend to clients, we have had to get right in our own product first.
The belief underneath all of it is simple. Software is easy to start and hard to stay responsible for. We take the second part.
- startups and SMEs served
- 28+
- building for UK businesses since
- 2020
What we hold to
Three things we will not trade away, even when it costs us the work.
- We tell you when the answer is no
- Sometimes the right advice is to not build it, to keep the spreadsheet another six months, or to spend the money elsewhere. We would rather say that and keep the relationship.
- Boring foundations
- We pick technology we can still support in three years over technology that demos well this quarter. You inherit what we build, so it has to be maintainable by someone who is not us.
- Clear pricing, no surprises
- Fixed scope where we can define it, and an honest conversation where we cannot. You will always know what you are paying for and what happens if it changes.
Some notable companies who trusted us
Also from LumenHarbor
Aditya wrote The SaaS Launch Kit for Founders Who Don't Code. It covers validation, hiring and technology decisions for founders without a technical background.
We also run training for teams as part of engagements.