Why "Non-Convex"?
In optimization, a convex problem is the easy kind. One clean minimum. One right answer. Gradient descent walks you straight there. Textbook stuff.
Real problems are not convex.
Real problems have local minima that look like solutions but aren't. Saddle points where progress stalls. Landscapes where the obvious path leads somewhere mediocre and the good answer is hiding in a direction nobody thought to look.
That's the work we do. The problems that don't have a clean slide deck answer. The ones where you need someone who has been stuck before, who knows what it looks like when a system is in a local minimum pretending to be solved, and who knows how to get it unstuck.
We named the company after the hard problems because those are the only ones worth solving.
What we believe
Most AI consulting is a confidence game. Vendors sell "transformation" and deliver a slide deck. Teams get trained on tools they'll never use. Executives buy a vision and get a proof-of-concept that dies in staging.
We think that's broken. Here's what we do instead.
Ship first, polish later. A working system that handles 80% of cases today beats a perfect architecture that's six months out. We get something into production fast, then iterate on what matters.
Be honest about what AI can't do. LLMs are powerful. They are also unreliable, expensive, and bad at math. We will tell you when a regex is the right answer. We will tell you when your problem doesn't need AI at all. That honesty saves you money and earns us trust.
Pragmatism over purity. We don't care about architectural elegance for its own sake. We care about systems that work, that your team can maintain, and that don't fall over at 2am. If the pragmatic choice is ugly, we'll write a comment explaining why and move on.
No black boxes. When we build something for you, you understand how it works. We document decisions, explain trade-offs, and make sure your team can own it after we leave. Consultants who create dependency are building a business model, not a solution.
Small teams, high trust. We don't staff projects with junior developers and a senior architect who shows up for the kickoff. The people who scope the work are the people who do the work.
Who builds this
Non-Convex Labs was founded by Aaddrick Williams, based in Ottawa.
His background is in technical program management for high-stakes manufacturing — specifically, secure document production for government clients. Driver's licenses, passports, the documents that have to work every time. He led equipment assessment, acquisition, installation, and integration for systems like multi-camera machine vision inspection lines and multi-layer security feature manufacturing. Supported four consecutive industry award-winning implementations. The kind of environment where you develop strong opinions about the difference between systems that demo well and systems that actually run in production.
The AI side started as personal projects. Claude Desktop for Linux — an open-source tool that repackages the Windows Electron app for Debian-based systems — has over 30,000 downloads. Voice transcription plugins, CLI agent tooling, a production SaaS with a real payment stack. He was shipping with LLMs while most organizations were still figuring out what to put on their AI strategy slide.
NCL exists because of the gap he kept watching between what these systems can do and what most teams were actually doing with them. Too much consulting, not enough shipping. A background in high-stakes manufacturing has a way of calibrating your expectations about what "production-ready" actually means.
The tools NCL builds for clients are the same tools powering NCL's own development workflow. This site is built and maintained using a multi-agent pipeline — automated issue implementation, quality gates, spec review, and code simplification running as a coordinated system. We don't demo this stuff. We run it.
Get in touch
If this sounds like how you want to work, we should talk.
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