Two facts on a dev shop's profile predict more about the working relationship than any service list: where the team sits, and how many people it has. Time zones decide when you can talk. Size decides who is on your project.
This guide groups eight listings from the directory by those two facts. Everything below comes from each company's own public site. Confirm details in a scoping call.
Start with the time zone you can live with
Overlap hours matter most during a pilot, when questions come up daily. Browse the North America, Europe, Balkans, Asia, Latin America and remote/global filters to see who works your hours.
Europe and the Balkans
- ProductDock AG is a subsidiary of codecentric AG, headquartered in Berlin. Its engineering hubs are in Novi Sad (Serbia) and Banja Luka and Doboj (Bosnia-Herzegovina), and the team is 120+ people. Ask whether your AI work is staffed from the Balkan hubs or from Berlin.
- Virtual Arc is a Belgrade studio building agentic AI systems with retrieval-augmented generation and multi-provider LLM orchestration. It also builds custom business software such as ERPs and B2B portals.
- inVerita is headquartered in Lviv, Ukraine, with offices in Ukraine, Poland and the US. Its listed work covers computer vision, generative AI, AI agents and data engineering.
Latin America and North America
- BairesDev is headquartered in San Francisco and draws mainly on Latin American engineers. It lists staff augmentation, dedicated team and project-based engagements.
- Nextsoft Corp is Colombia-based. It integrates LLMs such as ChatGPT or Claude with a client's own data, and delivers through custom projects or embedded staff augmentation teams.
- Grid Dynamics is a publicly traded firm (Nasdaq: GDYN) based in San Ramon, California. It serves Fortune 1000 enterprises with AI, data and analytics, and cloud work.
Asia
- Ekotek is Hanoi-based and ISO 27001/9001-certified. It has offices in Hanoi, Da Nang, Tokyo and Singapore.
- EnactOn Technologies is based in Surat, India. It builds single-task and multi-agent systems with LangChain and CrewAI, and its AI agent page says the build team is in-house and never subcontracted.
If you are in North America and considering a shop in Asia, plan the handoff routine before you sign. A written end-of-day summary and one fixed overlap window cover most of the gap.
Then decide how much bench you need
Size trades access for depth. The boutique, mid-size and large pages list each tier.
| Size | Example here | What you gain | What to ask | |---|---|---|---| | Boutique | Virtual Arc, Nextsoft Corp | Senior people near the work | Who covers if one engineer leaves? | | Mid-size | ProductDock AG, inVerita, EnactOn | Several workstreams, less layering | Where do the senior engineers sit on my project? | | Large | BairesDev, Grid Dynamics | A bench and parallel teams | Is the team from the sales call the team that builds? |
Ekotek does not list a size in our data, so ask directly.
Match the specialty before you compare anything else
Region and size narrow the list. Specialty confirms that a shop has done your kind of work.
- Agentic systems: see AI agents. Virtual Arc, EnactOn and Grid Dynamics are listed there.
- Images and video: see computer vision. inVerita is one listed example.
- Text and conversational tools: see LLM development and chatbot development.
- General builds: the custom AI development page is the widest filter. Narrow it by region or size next.
A shop that lists a specialty has claimed it. Ask for a case study with the same data type as yours, such as text, images or tabular records.
Questions that apply to every shop
- Who is on my team, by name? Get seniority and prior projects in writing.
- What is the engagement model? Project-based, dedicated team and staff augmentation work differently. Read the engagement model page to see how they differ.
- Where do the engineers sit? Confirm the office or hub that staffs your project, not just the headquarters.
- How do we handle running costs? Build scope and ongoing costs such as hosting and inference should be separated in the proposal.
- Who owns the code, model artifacts and data? Settle this before day one.
- Can we start with a small paid pilot? A scoped slice of real work shows more than a proposal does.
Checklist before you shortlist
- Pick the time zone overlap you need, then filter by region.
- Pick a size tier based on how much bench you need.
- Check the specialty against your actual data type.
- Open each shortlisted company's own site and confirm the details here.
- Ask the six questions above of every finalist, and compare the answers side by side.
- Run a short paid pilot before any larger commitment.
For the full decision process, see how to choose an AI dev shop and hiring AI developers.