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About · Founder-led · Dublin, Ireland

One operator. A lab that's bigger on the inside.

Strange Materials is a founder-led AI lab. One accountable human, a custom-built army of AI agents, and the whole modern toolchain — shipping work at a pace and breadth that doesn't look possible from the outside. That's the trick. That's the lab.

2012Building
since
100sApps & platforms
shipped
13+Years in regulated
industries
1Operator,
amplified
The Story So Far

Thirteen years of shipping. Then the frontier moved.

Strange Materials didn't appear when AI got fashionable. It's the latest regeneration of a practice that's been building commercial software for real businesses since 2012.

2012 · First builds

Software for businesses with real deadlines.

Custom apps, websites and platforms for companies that needed them to work on Monday — long before AI made building things look easy.

The decade in the trenches

Pharmacy & retail. Where mistakes cost money.

Hundreds of systems shipped, mostly in pharmacy and retail / e-commerce — industries where compliance, reliability and hard commercial outcomes are the price of entry. You don't get to ship slop to a pharmacy. That discipline never left.

The AI turn

We didn't bolt AI on. We rebuilt around it.

When modern AI arrived, the practice was rebuilt from the ground up — agents, orchestration, voice, vision, automation — and we started building our own AI products to learn faster than any client brief could teach us.

Today · Strange Materials

Every ounce of it, aimed at one job.

Finding the AI advantage your business is missing — and building it properly. Founder-led, engineering-deep, and relentlessly commercial.

Why “Strange Materials”?

Every business is made of strange materials.

Half-broken workflows. Tribal knowledge living in one person's head. Documents in nine places. The process everyone quietly avoids. None of it appears on the balance sheet — and all of it decides how the business actually runs.

Most agencies want clean requirements. We want the weird stuff — because that's where the advantage is buried. Bring us the problem that makes other agencies go quiet.

The Operator

When you work with the lab, you work with him.

The operator at the lab desk — system design on screen, notebook open, a glowing brain core beside the Strange Materials mug
MikeFounder & Operator

Mike has been building commercial software since 2012 — first in pharmacy and retail, where systems either work or cost real money, now at the AI frontier. He scopes every project, designs every system, and stands behind every build personally.

No account managers. No rotating cast of juniors. No telephone game between “the person who sold it” and “the people who build it.” The think-tank, the engineering and the accountability all live in one head — amplified by a machine room of custom agents.

✓
A custom agent crew per project

Researcher, builder, analyst, QA — assembled for your problem, run under one human's judgement.

✓
The whole toolchain, no favourites

Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, self-hosted models — the right blade per job, never one vendor's hammer.

✓
Thirteen years of pattern memory

Most “new” problems rhyme with something we've already shipped. That's speed you can't hire.

✓
Zero handoffs

The person you talk to is the person who builds it. Nothing is lost in translation, because there isn't one.

What We Believe

Six rules the lab won't break.

RULE 01

Evidence, not assertion.

We demo working software. If something isn't tested yet, we say “not yet tested” — never “done.”

RULE 02

No AI theatre.

If a spreadsheet solves it, we'll tell you. AI goes where it earns its keep — not where it photographs well.

RULE 03

Your data is yours.

Private by design. On your premises or your cloud. Your AI shouldn't phone home to someone else's.

RULE 04

Further than the brief.

You get what you asked for — plus the angles you didn't think to ask about. That's the point of a think-tank.

RULE 05

Plain English.

If you can run a business, you can understand exactly what we're building and why. Jargon is a hiding place.

RULE 06

Built to last.

Boring, reliable foundations under exciting systems. The excitement belongs in the results.

Strange Materials · trading name of Quantum Touch Limited Built in Ireland Lucan, Co. Dublin Building since 2012 AI training via HiveXP
Meet The Lab

The fastest way to meet us is to hand us a problem.

Tell Ray what's quietly eating your week. A human — the human, the one on this page — reviews every scan personally and comes back with a clear, priced build path.

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Founder-led · No sales call · A priced build path, not a pitch