AI products, end to end
RAG, agents, multimodal UIs, evals, and the infrastructure that keeps them alive in production. Frontend, backend, and the model glue in between.
Engineering studio · Naples, FL · Worldwide
Software that ships, payments that move billions, and AI that earns its keep.
A senior-led engineering studio for teams that want operators on the project, not org charts. We build AI products, DevOps systems, and embedded payments.
$6B+
Payments processed
500K+
Gamers in the community
20–30×
Growth in payments sales
10+ yrs
Shipping products
Four things we do well.
Senior people on every call, every commit, and the pager when something breaks. No account managers, no junior rotations, no handoffs to a team you’ve never met.
Embedded payments & fintech
PayFac strategy, embedded payments, branded card products, batch processing, capital lending. It’s the same playbook we ran at Caterease: it nearly doubled revenue and handled $6B+ a year on a 30-year-old platform.
DevOps & platform
Infrastructure that doesn't page you at 2 a.m. CI/CD, observability, cost engineering, and the boring safety nets that let a small team ship like a big one.
Delivery & PM
Someone has to write the spec, cut the scope, run the standup, and tell the CEO no. We’ve done it for ten years across gaming, fintech, and AI. We’d rather your engineers spend the day shipping than sitting in meetings.
Things we’ve actually shipped.
Ten years across gaming, fintech, and AI. The work below comes from actual products: revenue, users, transaction volume, the messy stuff that proves something was live.
Embedded fintech
Listen on Worldpay PayFAQ
Caterease · $6B in transactions on a 30-year-old platform
Took Caterease from PayPal-and-Intuit duct tape to a PayFac-as-a-Service model. That included a branded payment product called HPay, one-click batch processing for 300+ orders, embedded bank accounts, capital lending, and charge cards. Then built the sales team that sold it.
$6B+
Annual transactions
20–30×
Payments sales growth
~2×
Company revenue
50K+
Platform users
AI · Gaming · Founder product
Visit Kodex
Kodex · AI-native game discovery
Founded and shipped Kodex, an app that pulls your Steam, Epic, GeForce NOW, and console libraries into one place. Five AI characters help you figure out what to play next based on your mood. Live on Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android.
5
AI companion agents
4+
Platforms unified
Gaming · Community · Publishing
Aquatik · Esports, studios, and indie publishing
Founded Aquatik as an esports community, grew it to 500K+ gamers and 120M peak reach, then spun up a studio and indie publishing label that put titles on Xbox, Nintendo, Steam, Oculus, Google Play, and iOS.
500K+
Community
120M
Peak reach
6
Platforms shipped
The studio
Why “Detour”
Digital Detour started in 2020 as an actual travel agency: itineraries, hotels, the works. In 2026 we took our own advice and rerouted. Now we’re an engineering studio led by Andrew Bouley, with a network of senior collaborators we pull in by project. Andrew has a master’s in media design, ten years shipping AI, fintech, and gaming products, and a strong opinion that most software problems are smaller than the org charts trying to solve them.
The embedded payments stack we built at Caterease processed $6B+ a year in transactions. Aquatik grew to 500K+ gamers. Kodex, our AI product, is live on four platforms. We’ve been on the Worldpay PayFAQ podcast and in the kind of meetings with Stripe, J.P. Morgan, and Nvidia where something actually gets done.
The reason to hire us instead of a dev shop is simple: you want a team that’s already shipped the thing you’re trying to ship.
10+ yrs
Shipping at scale
Senior-led
Every commit, every call
No layers
No handoffs, ever
How a project actually goes.
Most projects run 8–16 weeks. Tight scope, everything written down, and at the end your team owns something they can run without us.
Understand the real problem
One intense week. We interview, audit code and data, map the system, and write a specification you could hand to another team. If we're not the right fit, we say so here.
Ship in tight iterations
Two-week cycles, with a working demo at the end of each one. You see progress every week, and if the project needs to stop or change direction, we do it at a sprint boundary. No extra fees, no awkward cleanup.
Cut over with a safety net
Staged rollout, observability wired in from day one, runbooks written, rollback rehearsed. Launches are boring and that's the point.
Keep it running — or hand it off
We can stay on as an on-call partner, or document everything and transition cleanly to your team. Your choice, not ours.
Get a one-page brief in two minutes.
Answer six quick questions and our AI drafts a real engineering brief, free, no email required. The brief is yours to keep, edit, or send back to us. We read every one personally.
Drafting your brief.
Reading your answers, mapping the architecture, and writing it up. About 10 seconds.
Your brief
Project brief
A senior engineer reads every brief before any reply. Nothing is stored on our end unless you send it.
Taking on 2–3 more projects this quarter
Tell us what you’re trying to ship.
Send a paragraph or two about what you’re building, where you’re stuck, and what “done” looks like. We’ll reply within a business day with honest thoughts, even if the answer is, “This isn’t for us, but here’s who we’d call.”
andrew@digitaldetour.com