Taking projects for Q3 Addis Ababa · remote worldwide

We ship AI-native products with teams who mean it.

Earendel is a product studio for companies betting on AI. Most agencies will build you a demo. We embed with your team for 8–16 weeks and leave you with a working product, the evals to trust it, and the engineers who understand every line.

Strategy, design, engineering — under one roof, on one timeline.

Founded

Addis Ababa · 2024

Team

12 designers, engineers & researchers

In flight

4 client engagements · 2 internal products
03 / OUR PRODUCTS

The tools we didn't find, so we built.

We dogfood every opinion we have about AI UX. Our flagship:

sites.earendel.et

Websites for businesses, done properly.

Tell us about your restaurant, clinic, or shop. We research, write, photograph, design, and ship a proper website in 48 hours — then you edit it in the portal we built. No templates. No drag-and-drop. No "AI website builder" slop.

400+
Live sites
48h
Turnaround
4.8★
From owners
Visit Sites
enqulalfest.et
ENQULAL · Addis Ababa · Ethiopian kitchen

Slow-cooked food, in a hurry-less room.

next · beta

Earendel Evals

An open eval workbench for product teams. Write cases in YAML, run nightly, alert on regressions.

Invite-only · Q3 2026
in research

Yaa — a small Amharic-English foundation model

A research track. Public checkpoints when we're proud of them. No AGI takes.

Updates on our writing
04 / HOW WE WORK

Four phases, no fog.

Every engagement follows the same rhythm. You always know what's being built, by whom, and why.

i

Diagnose

Two weeks. We read your code, talk to your users, and write a short memo. You keep the memo whether we continue or not.

Week 0–2
ii

Prototype

A working thing on your data, in your stack, behind a feature flag. Not a Figma. A deploy link.

Week 2–5
iii

Harden

Evals, guardrails, observability, docs, runbook. The unsexy work that separates a demo from a product.

Week 5–10
iv

Hand off

Your engineers own it. We run a 2-week shadow period, then we're on call for 90 days at no charge.

Week 10–12
05 / TEAM

A small senior team, meant to stay small.

We're four partners and a rotating bench. If you hire us, partners do the work — not account managers.

Dani Abebe

Founder · Engineering

Builds the hard parts. Previously staff eng at Andela. Spends weekends on slow-cooked doro and faster React.

Hanna Tesfaye

Founder · Design

Makes interfaces for non-deterministic systems. Wrote our house style. Doesn't believe in drag-and-drop.

Yonas Mekonnen

Partner · AI research

Runs the research track. Published on low-resource NLP. Has opinions about tokenizers that will outlast this decade.

Saba Tadesse

Partner · Strategy & ops

Keeps engagements on the rails. Spent a decade in healthcare ops. Will ask the question nobody wants to ask.

Plus 8 engineers, designers, and researchers who rotate through the bench. We hire slowly. If that sounds interesting, work@earendel.et.

06 / WRITING

Field notes from the AI product frontier.

What we publish when we have something actually worth saying. Monthly at most.

Featured essay · April 2026 · 14 min read

Against the demo industrial complex.

Most "AI products" are demos with a Stripe link. A real product has evals, runbooks, and a plan for when the model is wrong — which is always.

Read the essay
By Dani Abebe
Founder, engineering

A working note on why the gap between a convincing demo and a product your users actually depend on is 6 months of unglamorous work — and why we charge for that work up front.

07 / PARTNERS

Who we work alongside.

Dashen
ZEMEN
Awash
ETTA/01
Tikur Anbessa
safaricom
Hahu Jobs
ADDIS-LAB
Mara
chapachapa
Ride
ICOG
08 / FAQ

Questions we actually get asked.

Are you an agency or a product company? +
Both, intentionally. Client work pays the bills and keeps our engineers in real systems. Internal products (Sites, Evals, the research track) keep us honest about the gap between demos and production. We won't take a client engagement if we don't also ship in-house — the instincts come from making, not advising.
What does an engagement actually cost? +
Minimum $64k for an 8-week build. Embedded engineers start at $14k/month per seat with a 3-month minimum. Strategy sprints are a flat $22k for two weeks. We don't bill by the hour. We write every number on the SOW.
Will you sign an NDA before the first call? +
Yes — we keep a mutual 2-page NDA you can sign in the intake form. We don't ask for anything specific on the first call; we just want to understand whether we can help.
Do you work with seed-stage startups? +
Sometimes, with a smaller scope and a clear deliverable. We're not a cheap way to get an MVP built — you're paying for seniority, not hours. Most of our clients are Series B+ or established businesses betting on AI.
Can you work in our timezone / stack / language? +
We overlap 4–6 hours with US Eastern, full day with EU and Africa. We're comfortable in Python, TypeScript, Go, and the usual frontend stacks. We work in English, Amharic, and French. If you need 24/7 coverage, that's a staff aug conversation.
What happens after the engagement ends? +
We do a 2-week shadow period where your team owns the work and we're present for questions. After that we're on call for 90 days at no additional cost for anything related to what we shipped. Most clients retain us on a small monthly retainer for ongoing evals.
Is Earendel Sites a product you sell separately? +
Yes — it's a fully separate product at sites.earendel.et with its own pricing and customer base. We use it as a playground for AI UX, but it stands alone. If you're a business owner who just needs a website, start there, not here.
Where are you based? Can you come on-site? +
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. We travel for kickoffs and key workshops — two trips included in any engagement, additional trips at cost. We can also host your team here. The coffee is good.
09 / START

Tell us what you're trying to build.

A short, honest description of the problem is enough. We'll reply within two business days with a proposed call, or tell you straight that we're not the right team.

Office
Kazanchis, Addis Ababa
By appointment · coffee provided
Response
Within 2 business days, or a polite no.
We don't share or sell your info. We'll reply within 2 business days.