RAG Development

LLMs that know
your data.
Not just the internet.

We build retrieval-augmented generation systems that ground every answer in your private documents, databases, and knowledge bases - with citations, not hallucinations.

Build with us Case studies

Your Docs

PDFs, DBs, wikis

Chunking

Size + overlap strategy

Embeddings

text-embedding-3-large

Vector Store

Pinecone / pgvector

LLM

GPT-4o / Claude

Answer

Grounded + cited

Architecture decision

RAG vs fine-tuning: when to use which

When to use RAG

  • Your data changes frequently (docs, tickets, policies)
  • You need citations and auditability for every answer
  • You want to add AI without retraining a model
  • You have large corpora that won't fit in a context window
  • You need to retrieve across multiple data sources
  • Compliance requires traceable sourcing of every output

When to fine-tune instead

  • You need the model to adopt a very specific style or format
  • Your task is narrow and highly repetitive
  • Latency is critical and retrieval adds too much overhead
  • Your training data is stable and versioned
  • You want to reduce prompt size for efficiency
  • Task requires deeply embedded domain knowledge

Products

What we build

Document Q&A systems

Ask questions across PDFs, contracts, reports, and policies. Get precise answers with exact source references - not summaries.

Enterprise knowledge bases

Make your internal wikis, runbooks, and Confluence pages instantly searchable and answerable by your team - with access controls per user.

Semantic search

Replace keyword search with meaning-aware retrieval that finds the right content even when the exact words don't match the query.

Citation-backed generation

Every generated answer includes the source passage and document reference. Designed for legal, compliance, and regulated industries.

Production pitfalls

The 5 things that make RAG fail in production

01

Bad chunking strategy

Fix: We test chunk size, overlap, and boundary strategies per document type before building the index.

02

No reranking

Fix: Top-k retrieval returns noisy results. We add a reranker (Cohere, cross-encoder) to surface what's actually relevant.

03

Missing metadata filters

Fix: Without metadata, retrieval ignores date, source, and access scope. We design a metadata schema at the ingestion stage.

04

No eval harness

Fix: Without ground-truth QA pairs and automated scoring, quality regressions are invisible. We build evals before launch.

05

Ignoring latency

Fix: Retrieval + reranking + generation chains can be slow. We profile each step and apply caching and parallelisation.

Architecture

Our RAG stack

Ingestion pipeline

Unstructured.ioLlamaParseDoclingCustom parsers

Chunking strategy

Semantic chunkingRecursive text splitMarkdown-awareTable-preserving

Embedding model

text-embedding-3-largeCohere Embed v3BGE-M3Jina Embeddings

Vector store

PineconepgvectorQdrantWeaviate

Retrieval strategy

Dense (ANN)Sparse (BM25)Hybrid searchMulti-query

Reranking

Cohere RerankCross-encoderLLM-as-judge reranker

Generation

GPT-4oClaude 3.5 SonnetGemini 1.5 ProLlama 3 (self-hosted)

Evaluation

RAGASTruLensCustom golden QA suitesLangSmith

Retrieval methods

How we retrieve

Dense retrieval

Semantic similarity via embeddings

Pros

  • +Understands meaning and paraphrase
  • +Works well for conversational queries
  • +Language-agnostic embeddings

Cons

  • Misses exact keyword matches
  • Requires index rebuild on new data
  • Embedding model is a dependency

Default for conversational Q&A and domain knowledge bases.

Sparse (BM25)

Term-frequency keyword matching

Pros

  • +Excellent for exact product names / codes
  • +No embedding overhead
  • +Proven and fast

Cons

  • Misses semantic equivalents
  • Sensitive to vocabulary mismatch
  • No cross-lingual support

Best for product catalogues, error codes, and ID-based lookups.

Hybrid search

Dense + sparse with RRF fusion

Pros

  • +Best of both methods
  • +Higher recall than either alone
  • +Robust to diverse query types

Cons

  • More components to manage
  • Slightly higher latency
  • Requires tuning fusion weights

Our default for production systems where recall and precision both matter.

Featured result

"RAG pipeline that answers 94% of support tickets without human escalation - with citations from the product knowledge base."

94%

Auto-resolved tickets

< 3s

Median response time

0 hallucinations

In 6-month audit

Full case study
RAG in production
< 3s
Median end-to-end response time in production systems
94%
Support tickets auto-resolved without human escalation
0
Hallucinations in a 6-month production audit with citation enforcement
8 wks
Average time from data room to production RAG deployment
The knowledge problem
Without RAG

LLMs that make things up confidently.

Answers are drawn from training data, not your documents
Hallucinations are indistinguishable from correct answers
No citations - users can't verify anything
Stale knowledge the moment new docs are published
Cannot access private or proprietary company data
With RAG

Answers grounded in your private data, with proof.

Every answer retrieved from your own documents
Citations included so users can verify the source
New documents ingested in real-time - always current
Works on private, regulated, and confidential content
Access controls mean users only see what they're allowed to
Common questions

RAG development FAQ

What types of documents can a RAG system handle?
PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoints, Excel files, HTML pages, Markdown, CSV tables, and plain text. We use structured parsers that preserve tables, headers, and layout metadata - not generic text extraction that loses structure.
How do you prevent hallucinations in RAG systems?
Primarily through strict prompt engineering that instructs the model to answer only from retrieved context, combined with a citation requirement for every claim. We also build eval harnesses that test hallucination rate against a golden QA set before deployment.
Can RAG work with access-controlled content?
Yes. We design metadata filters and user-scoped retrieval so that each user only retrieves documents they have permission to access. This is critical for enterprise knowledge bases with role-based access.
How long does a RAG build take?
A baseline RAG system - document ingestion, chunking, embedding, retrieval, and generation with citations - can be built in 3–4 weeks. Production-grade systems with eval harnesses, access controls, monitoring, and multi-source retrieval typically take 6–10 weeks.
What happens when our documents change?
We build incremental ingestion pipelines that detect new or updated documents and re-embed only the changed content. Deleted documents are removed from the index. The system stays current without full re-indexing.
Full stack

Every layer of the RAG stack

Document parsing
Unstructured.ioLlamaParseDoclingPyMuPDFCamelot (tables)
Embedding models
text-embedding-3-largeCohere Embed v3BGE-M3Jina Embeddings v3
Vector stores
PineconepgvectorQdrantWeaviateChroma
Retrieval
Dense ANNBM25 sparseHybrid + RRFMulti-queryHyDE
Reranking
Cohere RerankCross-encoderLLM-as-judge rerankerFlashRank
Generation
GPT-4oClaude 3.5 SonnetGemini 1.5 ProLlama 3 (self-hosted)
Orchestration
LangChainLlamaIndexCustom pipelinesHaystack
Evaluation
RAGASTruLensLangSmithCustom golden QA suites

Ready to build your
next digital product?

Whether you have a detailed specification or just an early idea - we'll help you scope it, challenge the assumptions, and deliver it on time. No pitch decks. Straight to the point.

What happens next

1

Send us a message

Tell us what you're building or what's broken.

2

Discovery call (30 min)

We ask hard questions. You get honest answers.

3

Scoped proposal

Clear deliverables, timeline, and team in 48 hours.

Contact Us

Tell us about
your project

Whether you have a detailed brief or just an early idea, we will help you scope it, challenge it, and ship it.

  • Agentic AI development and multi-agent systems
  • Generative AI consulting and LLM integration
  • RAG development and custom model deployment
  • Data engineering, MLOps and custom software
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