Built by Operators, Not Theorists
We've spent our careers building infrastructure, shipping AI products, and fixing the data problems that break everything downstream. We know what fails because we've lived it.
Alex Barton
Co-Founder & CTO
Alex has spent nearly two decades in the trenches of technical operations, security, and AI infrastructure, from scaling Digital Ocean through hypergrowth (5K to 100K+ customers, 3 to 7 data centers) to architecting AI data products at Agnes Intelligence. He's built and led teams across AWS, GCP, Azure, and on-prem environments, conducted red team security assessments for Fortune 10 financial institutions, and developed AI models for biotech research. At Next Effect, he leads technical architecture and infrastructure, making sure every system we build is production-grade, secure, and built to scale.
LinkedIn
Kieran Jungé
Co-Founder & CEO
Built AI products at scale and learned where they fail: bad data underneath, not bad models. Experience spans AI MedTech, biotech, aerospace, defense, and government. Served as CEO and grew GreenCubes from zero to a $2.4M raise and a team of 12. Served as a technical consultant to the SEC and the Atlantic Council, bringing data infrastructure and AI expertise to high-stakes regulatory and policy environments. Built distributed systems for the UN climate summit at Earth Ledger. At Next Effect: leads client delivery, system architecture, and product strategy. Designs RAG pipelines, agentic AI systems, and the data infrastructure that makes them work.
LinkedInWhy We Started Next Effect
We kept seeing the same pattern from both sides of the stack. Alex watched organizations make critical decisions on broken data — at the SEC, at Fortune 10 institutions, at fast-scaling startups. Kieran watched AI implementations fail at company after company — not because the models were wrong, but because the data underneath was garbage. The AI vendors won't tell you this. They sell you the tools and let you figure out why nothing works. We started Next Effect because someone needs to fix what's underneath before the AI layer matters. That's the work most firms skip. It's the only work we do.
Foundation First
We don't deploy AI on broken data. Ever. Phase 1 is always cleaning and structuring what you have.
Regulated-Industry DNA
Financial institutions, biotech, aerospace — we build for environments where data integrity isn't optional, it's existential.
Outcomes Over Tools
We don't sell software licenses. We deliver infrastructure that makes your existing tools and future AI investments actually work.