We build software that organizations depend on.
Where AI Meets Engineering Excellence
A-CX is an AI-native software engineering company. We help organizations move faster from idea to production by combining product strategy, modern software engineering, and practical AI adoption. Our clients are founders, VPs of Engineering, CTOs, and CIOs who need a partner with the depth and accountability to deliver in production, not just in demos or experimentation.
We build our own AI-native coding tools, which means our teams ship faster and more accurately without adding headcount to do it. We also built A-CX AI Nexus, a framework that gives organizations the foundation to scale AI safely. Both are the result of solving real problems for real clients, and both make every engagement more effective.
Our leadership team
Ville Houttu
Co-Founder and CEO
Ville is the CEO of A-CX, with a career built on founding, scaling, and exiting high-growth technology companies. A three-time Inc. 5000 honoree and EY Entrepreneur of the Year finalist, his work has been featured in Forbes, TechCrunch, Inc., and Harvard Business Review, and he has spoken on leadership and technology as a TEDx speaker. He holds an MS in Engineering and brings deep expertise in AI adoption, digital transformation, and corporate governance to A-CX’s client engagements. Outside of work, he races single-speed mountain bikes, coaches high school riders, and explores Arizona and the Rockies on trails and slopes.
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Ilpo Niva
Co-Founder and CAIO
Ilpo has successfully headed product and technology development for fortune 500 companies. He has worked in a variety of large corporation executive and product management roles in addition to board membership in startups and SMEs, with excellent industry connections and a thorough understanding of how to create solid applications and services – based out of Silicon Valley.
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Mikko Peltola
Co-Founder and COO
Mikko’s career began by providing consumer and network management solutions to European and Middle Eastern telcos. At Nokia, he led a team of 30 product managers and delivered several award-winning products with 10’s of millions of phones sold. Since moving to the US, Mikko built a Developer Experience team at Microsoft and headed the cybersecurity company F-Secure’s corporate business in North America. Mikko is a citizen of the USA and Finland and currently lives in the DFW area, TX.
Branden Crawford
CTO
Branden is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at A-CX, renowned for his leadership and technical expertise. He graduated with a specialization in artificial intelligence. Branden has driven innovation in high-profile tech roles, excelling in software development, machine learning, big data, and cloud computing. His strategic vision has established him as a transformative leader.
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Risto Niva
Partner and MD Europe
Risto is a business executive with over 25 years of leadership experience in small to huge global companies. He was the CEO of Saraware from 1997 until he and his team sold the company to Wipro, one of the biggest Indian IT companies, in 2006. He performed several roles in Wipro, serving as Vice President and head of Scandinavia. He left Wipro in 2013, and has since worked as an entrepreneur. Risto has helped various companies as an investor, board member, or board chairman. At present, he serves as a board member in 8 companies. He lives in Rovaniemi, Arctic Circle.
We Do Things a Little Differently, and for Good Reason
Products creation is a balance between being bold and creative, avoiding costly mistakes, and executing with passion. To avoid surprises, we follow a few simple rules.
Small, Senior Teams
We keep engagement teams small and experienced. Our engineers use proprietary AI-native tools that accelerate delivery without cutting corners. Smaller teams with better tools consistently outperform larger ones.
Continuous Validation
We build with your users and your stakeholders, not just for them. Continuous validation reduces the cost of being wrong and gets better products into production sooner.
Full-Service Delivery
We bring product, design, development, and AI together under one engagement. You are not coordinating five vendors to deliver one outcome.
Our locations
Silicon Valley
California
Dallas
Texas
Phoenix
Arizona
Finland
Europe
Vancouver
Canada
Our team is distributed by design. We hire regionally so teammates can meet in person, then bring those local hubs together across the U.S. and Europe to align to your timezone, your stack, and your pace of work.
What We Expect from Ourselves
Curiosity
We ask better questions before we write better code. Curiosity drives how we approach every client problem, every architecture decision, and every AI tool we evaluate.
Fairness
We give clients honest assessments, even when the honest answer is inconvenient. We share what is working and what is not, with the people who need to know.
Accountability
We own our deliverables. If something is at risk, we say so early, with a plan. We do not disappear behind process when things get hard.
The ‘After the Pilot’ Problem
Most organizations don’t have an AI problem. They have an “after the pilot” problem.
The pattern repeats. Tools get tested, gains are real, adoption spreads fast. Then finance loses visibility, IT loses control, and institutional knowledge starts to drift. When something breaks, it doesn’t cost one person’s output. It costs ten times that.
Scaling AI requires three things in place before you go further. AI governance: who decides, who is accountable, and how risk is managed across the lifecycle, including what happens when something fails. AI security: how you protect the models, data, and infrastructure from misuse and failure. And AI ethics and compliance: whether the system should behave that way in the first place, covering fairness, transparency, and regulatory alignment.
Most organizations have fragments of all three. The enterprises that win the next five years will not be the ones that experimented earliest. They will be the ones who built the foundation to run what they started.
Experimentation was phase one. A-CX builds what comes next.
Ready to talk about what you’re building?
Tell us where you are. We’ll tell you what we’d do differently.
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