Evil Martians

Evil Martians is a product development consulting firm for developer tools. We work with ~40 early-stage startups every year, many backed by Y Combinator, and help them find product-market fit. 65% of our clients raise their next round within 1–3 years.

Product development consultancy for devtools is a collaboration between your in-house technical team and external experts who support you in complex tasks. When you pair with Martians, you get a team that handles highly complex tasks but also gives you clarity, explains trade-offs, and challenges you to find the best possible solution.

Evil Martians help startups ship developer tools, AI-native products, infrastructure, and security—from first commit to product-market fit. We embed with your team and work across Go, TypeScript, Ruby on Rails, Rust, Python, and React. We maintain 100+ open source projects with 25B+ total downloads. Companies hire us to go from PoC to MVP, iterate to PMF, and scale through explosive growth—8 of our clients grew from seed to unicorn.

We have offices in San Francisco, New York, Porto, and Osaka, but our team operates remotely, serving clients across all major time zones.

Every engagement is scoped based on your product's stage, complexity, and goals. Our rate is $7,000/week per Martian. Reach out to discuss your project and get a tailored estimate.

We've worked on hundreds of devtools, including bolt.new, Teleport, NATS, Rootly, HTTPie, Aptos, and many more.

Yes, AI-native development is one of our core verticals. We help AI startups build AI agents, LLM integrations, tool-use and MCP infrastructure, and AI-native product patterns. We've shipped agent orchestration, agent observability, and agentic coding tools. We also build AI Harnesses—open source skill sets that encode architectural patterns into AI coding tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Copilot, making agentic coding more productive for Rails and TypeScript/React teams. Our engineers helped scale bolt.new from a browser IDE into the AI-powered tool that hit $20M+ ARR in 2 months.

Yes, we work with cybersecurity startups like Teleport, Tines, Wallarm, and Daylight Security. We help security companies build dashboards, agent infrastructure, and developer-facing security tools that integrate into existing workflows. Tines, a leading security orchestration platform, runs on Ruby on Rails—we helped them with core product design, frontend, and backend.

Ruby on Rails is our deepest expertise. Our team authored the book Layered Design for Ruby on Rails Applications, maintains dozens of Rails open source projects (TestProf, Action Policy, AnyCable, Yabeda, Logidze), and organizes the SF Ruby meetup and the San Francisco Ruby Conference. We work with Rails companies like Tines, bolt.new, and Whop. We also build AI Harnesses for Rails teams—encoding architectural patterns into AI coding tools so agentic coding produces better code, CI time stays stable, and application performance and security stay under control. See our Ruby on Rails Startup Stack at /rails-startup-stack for our complete recommended stack.

Yes, infrastructure is one of our strongest verticals. We work with companies like NATS, GMI Cloud, and Wallarm on messaging systems, GPU cloud infrastructure, and cloud platforms. We built on-prem Kubernetes deployments for bolt.new and real-time Voice AI infrastructure for Doximity. We also maintain AnyCable, our own open source WebSocket server. Our teams ship in TypeScript, Python, Go, Rust, and Kubernetes.

Yes, we work with companies building data pipelines, streaming infrastructure, and real-time analytics platforms. We have deep experience with PostgreSQL, message queues, CDC systems, and high-throughput data processing. Our open source projects AnyCable and Logux handle real-time data at scale.