About
A software house that learned to say no.
Appoly has been building production software for UK businesses since 2017. Appoly Intelligence is the AI arm — same team, same operating model. The bit that's new is the honest framing around when AI is the right answer, and when it isn't.
The parent firm
Appoly. Software for businesses with real operations.
Appoly is a UK software company based in Leamington Spa. We've shipped production systems for clients across financial services, legal, manufacturing, healthcare, and operations-heavy SMEs since 2017. About 40 of those have meaningful AI components — agents, retrieval systems, computer vision, forecasting models. The other side of the business does standard product engineering: web platforms, mobile apps, internal tools.
Appoly Intelligence is the dedicated AI brand. Same engineers, same delivery process, separate framing because buying an AI engagement is a different conversation to buying a web app.
Visit appoly.co.uk ↗How we got here
Nine years of shipping things that had to work.
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2017
Appoly founded. Started as a software house building custom systems for UK SMEs — financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, legal.
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2019
Crossed twenty production systems delivered. Began specialising in document-heavy workflows — the patterns that became the AI work later.
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2022
First commercial RAG and embedding-based systems shipped. The team started turning down builds that didn't need custom work and recommending alternatives.
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2024
Strategy and adoption engagements added explicitly. Clients had been asking for board-level decision support; we stopped pretending it was scope for a build.
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2026
Appoly Intelligence launched as the AI arm — same engineers, same operating model, more honest framing for the work we were already doing.
Why we add the strategy work
We were closing more builds than we were finishing well.
Around 2023 we started noticing a pattern. Clients would arrive with a confident specification — "build us X" — and somewhere into discovery, the actual problem turned out to be different. Sometimes X was right but the data wasn't there yet. Sometimes a cheaper automation would have done the job. Sometimes the problem was process, not technology.
We started doing two-week diagnostics before quoting builds, partly to protect ourselves from scope drift and partly to give clients a chance to walk away with a clear answer instead of a half-right system. About one in five of those diagnostics now ends with us recommending the client not automate — or fix something else first.
That's the engagement model we built Appoly Intelligence around. The diagnostic is paid, fixed-price, and refundable if we change our mind. The build is a separate decision.
Who you'll meet
Three founders.
In the room for the work.
James Merrix
Managing Director
Started Appoly in 2017 after running engineering at a UK fintech. Has personally signed off on every production deployment since. Worries about the things that break at 2am.
Direct line for clients during diagnostics and strategy work. Sits in the room for the first conversation and the last.
Guy Stanton
Operations Director
Runs the projects. If something's going to be late, Guy knows about it before anyone else does.
Manages the client relationship through delivery. Keeps the scope honest and the timeline real.
John Wedgbury
CTO
Built the systems that handle 10 million+ documents. Picks the stack, draws the architecture, and writes code when it matters.
Owns technical decisions on every engagement. Where the diagnostic recommends a build, the design starts at his desk.
Where we work
Leamington Spa. Real engineers. UK hours.
Our office is on the Parade in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire — about an hour from London, an hour from Birmingham, a couple from Manchester or Bristol. We travel for client work and run most discovery sessions on site. Delivery work happens here.
UK data residency by default. ISO 27001 aligned. We've delivered into financial services, legal, healthcare, manufacturing, and other regulated sectors. NDA security pack available on request.
Appoly Intelligence
7 Parade
Leamington Spa, Warwickshire
CV32 4DG, United Kingdom
Twenty minutes. No deck.
If something here lines up with what you're looking at, the cheapest next step is a short call. We'll tell you honestly whether a diagnostic is worth doing.