AI development company for UK businesses:
AI & ML, production-ready.

At Magora a working prototype is free, Discovery is from £3,000 and an AI MVP from £10,000, with most MVPs between £10,000 and £25,000 (2026 prices, GBP). Larger builds start higher: AI agents from £20,000, a fine-tuned model from £25,000, a RAG pipeline with an API from £30,000 and a production LLM application from £40,000. Our rates start from £49/hour per developer, and £65–£70/hour for a full team with QA and product ownership. See what 12 real 2026 projects cost or try the cost calculator.

A working prototype takes 5–10 working days and Discovery two weeks. A first release typically takes 6–8 weeks after that. Larger agent systems and multi-model platforms are delivered in phases.

Not by us, and not by the model providers we build on by default. We use business API tiers, such as the OpenAI and Anthropic APIs, Azure OpenAI and AWS Bedrock, whose terms exclude training on customer inputs by default, and we check the current terms for your project in Discovery. For the most sensitive data, open-source models can run entirely on your own infrastructure.

Application data, vector stores and logs can be hosted in UK or EU cloud regions on AWS, Azure or Google Cloud. If model processing must also stay in-region, we choose a provider and model that support it, or deploy privately through Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock or a self-hosted open-source model.

Yes, and it is one of our most common projects: search and summaries over data you already hold, a RAG assistant over your documents, AI agents for internal workflows, or a copilot inside your admin system. We start by reviewing your code and data, then add the AI feature without a rebuild.

OpenAI, Anthropic Claude and Google Gemini models, plus open-source models such as Llama, Mistral and Qwen for private or on-premise deployments. We choose on accuracy, latency, cost and data-protection needs for your use case, not on brand.

Most business use cases start with RAG: the model answers from your own documents and records, which stay up to date without retraining. Fine-tuning fits when you need a consistent style, format or narrow task and have good examples to train on. Discovery tells you which one, or which combination, your case needs. See our RAG development page for how these systems are built, secured and priced.

Yes. We build agents that call your tools and APIs to complete multi-step work, with guardrails, logging and human approval for the steps that matter. More on our AI agent development page.

You do. We sign an NDA on day one, the code lives in your repository as it is written, and source code, prompts, evaluation sets, fine-tuned model weights, designs and IP transfer to you on payment.

A machine learning development company builds software that learns from your data to predict, classify or flag things. At Magora that covers prediction, classification, anomaly detection and computer vision, plus the data pipelines they depend on and the evaluation and monitoring that keep a model accurate after launch. Examples: machine-learning analytics on a map in KMA 9x9, and receipt scanning in Expensify. Custom machine learning needs a labelled historical dataset; if prompting a model API or RAG would do the job at lower cost, Discovery will show that first.

AI development is the wider term: building software that uses AI, including LLM apps, RAG search and AI agents. ML development is the part where a model is trained on your data to predict or classify something. Many business projects need only a model API plus retrieval; some need a custom model. We compare the options in the table above and pick the one that does the job at the lowest running cost.

We design for it: a data-minimisation review in Discovery, DPIA support, personal data redacted before prompts where needed, role-based access, configurable logging and UK or EU hosting options. Whether a particular system is lawful depends on your use case and legal basis, which your data protection officer or legal adviser decides; we supply the technical input. See the data safety options above.

We agree success measures in Discovery, then score every sprint on a test set drawn from your real cases for accuracy, cost per request and failure modes. After launch we monitor accuracy, cost and drift. See how we measure an AI system above.

Both. A fixed price is quoted after the free prototype and a two-week Discovery from £3,000. For work that will keep changing, a dedicated team is billed from £49 an hour per developer, monthly rolling. Support after launch is from £1,000 a month. See fixed-price software development and UK software development pricing.

Our office is in Shoreditch, London, and we work with UK businesses on projects with weekly demos on a staging environment you can log in to. On-site meetings elsewhere in the UK are available by arrangement. We also deliver AI and ML development for clients in the USA, UAE and Australia.

Ask for named AI projects with measured outcomes, ask where your data is processed and whether it is used to train models, ask how accuracy is tested before launch, and ask who owns the code, prompts and models. Compare answers across three companies. Our general method is in how to choose a software development company in the UK.

An AI development company builds the data, model and evaluation layers (prompts, retrieval, fine-tuning, monitoring) as well as the application around them. A software development company with AI capability, like Magora, builds both the AI features and the software they live in, so the AI is not a separate project.

Yes: Empath AI (live vulnerability detection for call-centre agents), BodySync (AI-generated physiotherapy treatment plans), University of Essex (on-premise data classification with local models), Interprefy (real-time interpreting and AI live captions), Expensify (receipt-scanning OCR) and KMA 9x9 (map-based data and machine learning). Each case study states the problem, what we built and the outcome.