Steve Kirton

I help founders, charities, and tech-forward teams ship blockchain and AI products that actually work in production — not prototypes, not whitepapers, finished systems people use.

Five production applications shipped in 12 months. 6th place in the Algorand Foundation Startup Challenge against 200+ international entries. Architecture iterated through five major pivots on Atelier OpenLedger before landing on a PSD2 Open Banking integration that eliminated ten evaluated payment providers — a level of adversarial diligence most teams skip and then pay for later.

I'm the founder of Kirke Labs, specialising in three things: Algorand smart contracts, AI integration (Claude API, multi-modal RAG, agentic systems), and the architectural judgement to make them fit together. Recent shipped work includes CasaLotto (Algorand-native charitable raffles routing 55% of revenue directly to charity via on-chain policy wallets), The Marketing Machine (multi-modal RAG founder marketing platform),

Alongside the engineering, 17 years managing operational teams of 30–55 people across dispersed units at Royal Mail — where I built proprietary analytics tooling (DPR leaderboards, route analysis, Excel VBA driver performance suite, PowerShell parallel-processing pipelines) adopted across the office.

Translation: I architect systems that survive contact with reality. Compliance considered from day zero (MiCA, PSD2, GDPR), shipped on deadline, accountable for outcomes.

Engagements I take on:

Web design

Algorand smart contract design, development, and audit-prep

AI agent and LLM orchestration architecture (Claude API, RAG pipelines, prompt engineering)

Full-stack product builds: Next.js, React, TypeScript, FastAPI, Supabase

Technical architecture consulting and product-pivot diligence

Web3 + payments integration (PSD2 Open Banking, policy wallets, walletless onboarding)

Remote-first, UK and Abruzzo (Italy), async-friendly, EU and UK ready. Let's talk about what you need to ship.