A small studio. Senior engineers. AI leverage.
Why Basetool Labs exists
Most SMB founders don't need to hire a team of ten. They need one senior engineer who can ship the right thing fast, talk to users directly, and hand off a codebase the internal team can extend.
Basetool Labs is that, compressed by AI. Eight years shipping product at YC-backed startups (The Social Cat, Waydev (YC W21), and the Avo Rails admin framework), paired with the engineering leverage of AI-native tooling. Fixed sprints, fixed prices, senior only.
How we work
- 01
Ship weekly
Every sprint produces a working demo on Friday. No exceptions. Software you can't use every week is software that doesn't get made.
- 02
Senior only
No juniors, no offshore handoffs, no project managers forwarding emails. If you're on a call with Basetool Labs, you're talking to the engineer writing your code.
- 03
AI as leverage, not a party trick
We use Claude Code, Cursor, evals, and whatever else moves the needle. If a feature needs AI we ship it. If it doesn't, we don't fake it.
Founder
Basetool Labs is run by David Marin, founder of Basetool Labs and Sussur. Previously Product Engineer at The Social Cat, Software Engineer at YC W21 Waydev, co-founder of the open-source Rails admin framework Avo, Software Engineer at Oceaneering and Amdocs (Vodafone Romania), Salesforce consultant at Deloitte Digital. BSc Computer Science, University of Twente. IEEE SMC 2020 Best Paper.
Read David's page →The team
Basetool Labs is a small senior team: David, plus the collaborators and the AI tooling that let us ship like a bigger one. Meet the people and the process.
Meet the team →Our new studio
In June 2026 we opened the Basetool Labs studio in Constanța. Take a look around the space and the night we opened the doors.
See our office →Tell us what you're building.
30 minutes on the calendar. No pitch. We listen, we ask questions, we tell you whether we can help.