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Work

Selected work

A sample of recent engagements and solo-built products spanning sovereign AI, applied ML, real-estate technology, and enterprise data platforms.

Sovereign AI & document intelligence

AI applications

Entertainment-industry client · 2024–2025 · multimodal media analytics + production rollout

Media analytics & creative intelligence for an entertainment client

An entertainment-industry client produced large volumes of creative assets and promotional media every quarter and needed a way to predict which ones would resonate with their audience before committing distribution and paid-media spend. Existing analytics surfaced post-launch performance but offered no signal during the pre-launch window where decisions actually get made.

MultimodalMedia analyticsEntertainment
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Entertainment-industry client · 2025 · email classification + routing

LLM email triage for entertainment industry

An entertainment-industry company was drowning in inbound email — agent submissions, press requests, fan/PR escalations, legal notices, internal team threads — all flowing into shared inboxes with no time to triage cleanly. Important threads slipped through; routine ones consumed disproportionate attention.

LLMClassificationEntertainment
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Luxury fashion / accessories brand · 2025 · multimodal recommendation engine

AI-based recommendation system for a luxury brand

A luxury brand needed a recommendation system, but standard collaborative filtering breaks for luxury — purchase frequency is low, statistical co-occurrence between customers is sparse, and brand aesthetic matters far more than price clustering. A customer who buys one piece does not follow the same pattern as the next.

RecommendationLuxuryMultimodal
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International NGO · 2025 · LLM-driven email triage + response drafting

NGO — AI email management for the communications team

An NGO communications team was processing tens of thousands of inbound emails — donor enquiries, partner requests, press, volunteer applications, advocacy correspondence — all flowing into shared inboxes. The team had a small full-time staff who were spending most of their day routing and drafting initial responses to repetitive enquiries.

LLMNGOEmail automation
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Real estate & PropTech

Applied ML & data science

Climate-finance research client · 2025 · econometric impact analysis

Climate finance — policy impact analysis

A climate-finance research organisation needed to quantify the impact of specific policy interventions on capital flows and emissions — separating the policy signal from confounding macro factors, sector trends, and pre-existing trajectories.

Causal inferenceClimate financePolicy
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Financial-services client · 2023 · real-time inference + monitoring

Real-time fraud detection pipeline

A financial-services client needed real-time fraud detection on transaction streams — flag suspicious activity within milliseconds of a transaction, with low false positives that would otherwise burn customer-experience budget on legitimate users.

Fraud detectionReal-timeFinTech
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Enterprise client (Upwork Enterprise) · 2021 · ETL + ML model deployment

AWS Enterprise ETL + ML on SageMaker

A US-based enterprise client needed a cloud-native ETL and ML platform on AWS — ingest raw data from multiple operational sources, transform it into model-ready features, train and deploy production models on SageMaker, and serve predictions back to downstream consumers with proper observability.

AWSSageMakerMLOps
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Agri-tech / SMB lending client · 2025 · invoice-data ML pipeline

Agri-credit scoring from invoice data

An agri-tech lender needed to extend credit to SMB farmers and food producers without traditional credit-bureau coverage. The available signal was raw invoice data — purchase orders, payment histories, supplier relationships, seasonality patterns — sitting in unstructured PDFs and accounting exports across the borrower's existing book.

Credit scoringInvoice MLAgri-FinTech
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Mid-market e-commerce client · 2024 · churn modelling + retention pipeline

E-commerce churn analysis & predictive retention

A mid-market e-commerce client had rising customer-acquisition costs but no reliable signal on which customers were about to lapse. Standard "haven't bought in 90 days" rules flagged everyone too late — by then the customer had already moved to a competitor.

ChurnE-commerceSurvival analysis
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US local political campaign · 2024 · precinct-level data analysis

County-level voter analysis for a US local political campaign

A US local political campaign at the county level needed precinct-level targeting — where to door-knock, where to spend on local ads, which voter segments to focus on. The campaign had voter-file data, demographic snapshots, and turnout history but no one to turn it into operating decisions.

Political analyticsVoter filePrecinct
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International NGO · 2025 · NLP analysis on free-text survey responses

NGO — survey response analysis with NLP

An NGO ran a large-scale survey across multiple regions and received tens of thousands of free-text responses to open-ended questions. The communications and policy teams needed to surface themes, sentiment, and regional variation — but had been doing it by spreadsheet for previous waves and missing patterns in the long tail.

NLPNGOSurvey
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Open-source · Started March 2026 · applied ML (Python)

Meridian, maritime route intelligence

Planning a ship's route means balancing distance, weather, fuel, and time across open ocean, a high-dimensional optimization where naive shortest-path thinking leaves money and safety on the table.

Applied MLGeospatialOptimization
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Solo-built products

Solo-built product · 2024–2026 · live in production

AskVault — RAG-first knowledge retrieval (solo-built SaaS)

Existing knowledge-management tools either index documents without understanding them or generate confidently wrong answers. Teams building real workflows on internal knowledge need neither — they need calibrated retrieval that says "I do not know" when the corpus does not actually contain the answer.

SaaSRAG0→1
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Solo-built product · live at goprivox.com

Privox — privacy-focused micro-SaaS

Most consumer-facing SaaS treats privacy as a checkbox. The micro-SaaS opportunity was to build a tool where privacy is the actual product mechanic, not a marketing claim — minimal data collection, no third-party tracking, clean opt-in for everything.

Micro-SaaSPrivacy0→1
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Solo-built product · Started May 2026 · live at agentcal.co

AgentCal, scheduling built for AI agents

Scheduling tools assume a human is clicking. As AI agents start booking meetings and calls on behalf of users, they need a programmatic way to read availability and reserve slots, not a calendar UI to click through.

AI agentsSchedulingAPI
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Solo-built product · Started June 2026 · live demo

LedgerFlow, an AI-native ERP and accounting system

Small and mid-sized companies run on accounting tools that are either too basic or too heavy, and almost none are built around AI. Founders want books that stay close to ready, not a quarter-end scramble.

ERPAccountingLLM copilot
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Solo-built product · Started May 2026 · mobile, EU privacy-first

CaloriAI, photo-based calorie tracking with vision models

Calorie tracking fails because logging is tedious. People stop weighing food and searching databases within days. The friction, not the willingness, is what breaks the habit.

Vision LLMMobileConsumer
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Solo-built product · Started May 2026 · Expo + FastAPI (EU)

Skinova, AI skin analysis on mobile

Good skincare guidance is hard to get without a dermatologist visit, and most apps offer generic tips rather than reading a person's actual skin.

Computer visionMobileHealthTech
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Solo-built product · Started January 2026 · speech ML

French Accent Coach, phoneme-level pronunciation feedback

Language learners plateau at the accent stage. Generic apps mark a phrase right or wrong, but they cannot tell you which sound you mispronounced or how to fix it.

Speech MLAudioEdTech
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Want a similar engagement on your stack?

Most engagements above started with a 60-minute scoping call.

Aru Bhardwaj

Fractional CTO architecting sovereign AI systems for startups and scale-ups across Europe. Custom ML, agentic RAG, and secure LLM infrastructure. 7+ years turning complex data into production intelligence.

Malt
Upwork

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  • Fractional CTO & AI Strategy
  • MVP Development & Rapid Prototyping
  • Sovereign LLM Deployment (OVHcloud, Scaleway)
  • Multi-Cloud AI (AWS Bedrock, Vertex AI, Azure)
  • RAG Pipelines & Autonomous Agents
  • GDPR & EU AI Act Compliance
  • Generative AI & Prompt Engineering
  • Machine Learning & Predictive Analytics

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© 2026 Insightrix SASU. All rights reserved.Aru Bhardwaj, Fractional CTO & AI Strategist

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