Founder-led AI & software studio

AI that survives contact with the real world.

Built by people who have actually shipped it.

A London-based studio built around a decade shipping production AI in healthcare, government and regulated data. Strategy, product and engineering, from the boardroom to production.

Cheerful Monster

A decade building & advising across

Babylon Health Sensyne Health Mayo Clinic Platform NHS Cabinet Office Dyad Protera Health Multiple startups

Track record

A decade of production AI behind some ambitious companies.

>$600M
fundraising and scale at Babylon Health, where Steven led the AI foundations
100+
AI, software & clinical-technology team built and led at Sensyne Health
£60M
AIM IPO supported as CTO/COO of Sensyne Health
$3M+ ARR
built at Dyad with BetterLetter, applying semantic AI to NHS clinical documents

What we do

From the boardroom to production.

One small team that can advise the strategy and then build the thing, without handing you off between specialists.

01

AI systems that ship

Production AI that survives real-world mess.

Generative and neurosymbolic AI, graph-based methods and knowledge representation, NLP, data engineering, and robust backends to run it at scale. All done in highly regulated environments like healthcare with real consequences.

02

Product from zero to useful

From a rough idea to something people use.

Discovery, prototyping, build, measurement, iteration. One small team that takes the fuzzy early thinking through to a product that's shipped, measured, and genuinely good to use.

03

AI strategy & technical diligence

Senior counsel, up to the boardroom.

Where AI creates value, what not to build, and how to lead the team that delivers it. Honest technical judgement for executives, boards and investors making expensive decisions.

How we work

AI-native, with senior hands on the wheel.

We build the way the strongest teams now build: AI at the centre of the work, guided by senior engineering and product judgement that knows what good looks like. The result is efficient, high-quality output that delivers exactly what you need.

AI at the centre

We build AI-native, treating today's best models as a genuine force multiplier across the whole stack.

Senior hands on the wheel

A decade of production experience shapes what to build and how to build it, so the AI's output is architected and guided, not just generated.

Small team, big output

The combination lets a small, senior team ship agile feature development and high quality code quickly.

Skills transfer

And we can teach your team to build this way too.

The same approach makes a strong skills transfer: embedded alongside your engineers, or run as a focused workshop. We shape it to fit.

Talk to us about it
Steven Hamblin

About

Cheerful Monster is founder-led by Steven Hamblin, who has spent a decade building and leading the AI behind some genuinely ambitious companies.

He built the AI foundations at Babylon that contributed to its rapid growth, helped take SaMD software and clinical AI to population scale at Sensyne through to a £60M AIM IPO as CTO & COO, and co-founded Dyad to put semantic AI to work on NHS clinical documents.

Today he advises teams like Mayo Clinic Platform and Protera Health on the question he keeps coming back to: where AI creates real value, and how to build the systems (and the people) that ship it.

Steven Hamblin
Founder · AI advisor & operator

Serious software and AI, built with a little warmth.

The name is a quiet joke with a soft centre, a nod to the “hopeful monsters” of evolutionary biology. We take the engineering and business outcomes very seriously, and ourselves a little less so.

Start a conversation

Tell us what you're building.

A board-level AI question, a product to ship, or a system that has to hold up. We read every message ourselves, and we'll always reply.