An independent technology studio

Software
that holds
the line.

zanshin is a small studio building durable software for hard problems. Few projects at a time. A senior team, deeply involved, kept close to the work long after the launch.

Begin a project Read the manifesto

01 / Practice

What we
build.

A small studio with a wide enough toolkit to take a project from a sketch to something that runs in production. We work as a team, not a roster.

  1. i

    Product engineering

    End-to-end product builds for early teams that need senior judgment, not staffing. Web, mobile, API, infrastructure, and the unglamorous wiring in between.

  2. ii

    Applied AI & agents

    Useful systems built on the current generation of model capability. We treat AI like any other unreliable dependency: with care, with evals, and with fallbacks for when it misbehaves.

  3. iii

    Infrastructure & platforms

    Internal platforms, developer tooling, data pipelines, the layer underneath the layer. The work that quietly makes everything else faster.

  4. iv

    Design systems & strategy

    Visual language, component libraries, architecture reviews, hiring plans. Embedded engagements with founding teams when the stakes are high and the path is unclear.

02 / Beliefs

What we
hold.

A quiet doctrine for the kind of software we want to make. Six things, in order of importance.

  1. i

    Build for the hundred years.

    The work we take on is meant to outlast us. Our software should at least try.

  2. ii

    Hard problems over hyped ones.

    The places where shipping software is genuinely difficult, and genuinely needed. We pick those.

  3. iii

    Few things, slowly.

    One thing in production, one in research, one in the imagination. Anything more than that and the work suffers.

  4. iv

    The system is the product.

    Not the screen, not the brand, not the launch. The thing that runs at three in the morning, unattended, correctly.

  5. v

    Boring is a feature.

    Predictable. Reliable. Almost invisible. We optimise for the absence of incidents, not the presence of dashboards.

  6. vi

    Stay near the customer.

    Until it works. Then a little longer. Then we leave the documentation and the source map.

03 / Our product

The product we have built.

A zanshin product

Devki.

A lifecycle management platform for educational institutions, designed and built by zanshin.

An institution thinks in records, money, and messages. Devki has a layer for each. Three connected layers that share a single source of truth, so an admission, a fee plan, and a parent notification stop being three different systems pretending not to know about each other.

Layer 01

Ark

Administrative

The system of record. Admissions, attendance, examinations, certificates, audits. Captured once, referenced everywhere.

Layer 02

Dhanyatra

Financial

The flow of money. Student fees, staff payroll, vendor payouts. Reconciled in real time and accountable end to end.

Layer 03

Pravaah

Communication

The current. WhatsApp, SMS, email, push, unified into one delivery flow. Every message tied back to the event that triggered it.

Talk to us about Devki

Other engagements with select partners are not listed here. Reach out if you would like to talk.

04 / Begin

Build something
that holds.

We work with a small number of teams each year. If you are building a system that should not break, write to us. A real person will read it.

A short note about what you are working on is enough to start.