About Pennybacker
Engineers who ship. Operators who get it.
Pennybacker AI is a founder-led firm in Austin, Texas. We build production AI systems for operators in energy, industry, and finance — and we run our own firm on the same systems we sell.
The firm exists to close a gap we kept seeing: strategy firms that can't build, and builders who've never run an operation. We're named for the Pennybacker Bridge — because the distance between an AI plan and a working system is where most initiatives die, and spanning it is the whole job.
How we work
Four commitments.
Own the outcome
We're measured by what ships and gets used — not by decks delivered or hours billed. The engagement isn't done until the system is running in your environment.
Senior-only
The engineer who scopes your work is the engineer who builds it. No junior bench, no offshore handoff, no learning on your budget.
Operations-native
We build AI inside a real, regulated, high-stakes operation every day. We design for permissions, audit trails, and the way work actually flows — not the demo.
Honest math
If AI isn't the right tool for a problem, we'll tell you. Every recommendation comes with real ROI reasoning you can defend to a board.
Founders
The team.
Ryan Harty
Founder & Principal Engineer
Builds production AI systems for one of the largest power-plant construction programs in the country: agentic document intelligence, financial-data integrations, and workflow automation across project controls.
LinkedIn →Max Holter
Lead Data Engineer
Data engineer and AI practitioner with experience at Meta, Coinbase, and Indeed. Builds production AI tools, data pipelines, and monitoring systems supporting high-stakes decision-making at scale.
LinkedIn →Plus the agents we've built — our delivery pipeline is itself an agentic system. See Firm OS.