Philippe Gratton, co-founder of Chrono Innovation, knows that founders rarely suffer from a shortage of ideas. What they often lack is the time and capacity to turn those ideas into a workable product.
Historically, that deficiency created a clear path to software development agencies. Bringing in a seasoned external development team can be faster and cleaner than hiring internal employees, onboarding them, and waiting months for a product or feature to be ready. For years, the agency model has worked.
“Today is a bit different,” Gratton said. “Now, agencies are competing against the customer’s curiosity. Now your customer can go on Lovable, Cursor, Bolt, Replit, and build a prototype without having to disturb any team operations.”
“Our mission is really to equip businesses with the tools they need to thrive and adapt in a fast-changing world.”
Chrono Innovation has spent the last six years operating within the agency model. Founded as a dev shop in 2019, the Montréal-based company builds mobile apps, web apps, and APIs with a specialization in SaaS. The firm has also built its own products, including a platform that helps startups quickly claim Scientific Research and Experimental Development tax credits.
“Our mission is really to equip businesses with the tools they need to thrive and adapt in a fast-changing world,” Gratton said.
For most of its history, Chrono Innovation has delivered on that mission through client services. But in the last six months, the company’s work has changed, less in what it builds than how it builds.
“We now heavily leverage AI agents, but we still have a team of 45 software engineers in Montréal,” Gratton said.
Each member of Chrono Innovation’s team is working with 15 to 20 AI agents at any given time. Those employees spend much more time validating the output, rather than writing every line of code themselves. As that shift made Chrono Innovation’s own delivery process more efficient, the company began looking at whether the agency model itself could be streamlined.
In recent months, Chrono Innovation set out to productize its services and expertise in building software, with the goal of passing some of the productivity gains and cost savings on to other companies. The result was Launchpad.
“We invested a lot of time in making this possible internally,” Gratton said. “Launchpad is a way for us to help other companies benefit from this investment in building reliable frameworks that use AI agents while keeping a human in the loop.”
Launchpad, now officially live, is designed to slash the time it takes to build with a software development agency. Customers begin by prompting Lucius, Launchpad’s AI agent, with details about their project, including the product need, scope, and requirements. Lucius then summarizes the scope, pressure-tests the idea, flags potential risks early, and generates a quote. Once the quote is accepted, a team of AI agents starts building the product, supervised by senior engineers.
Customers can choose from three pricing tiers based on the level of work required. They can also opt for a custom pricing tier, which lets them build a quote à la carte by choosing specific components of the project scope.
“We’re aiming for what we call outcome-based pricing,” Gratton added. “You give us the scope, we analyze, we get back to you with a full quote in minutes.”
Philippe Gratton,
“Launchpad is a way for us to help other companies benefit from this investment in building reliable frameworks that use AI agents while keeping a human in the loop.”
Chrono Innovation
These conversations are a routine part of the discovery process between agencies and clients, but they can often stretch across weeks or months. With Launchpad, companies can complete that discovery process within minutes. Trimming the excess from the process is part of the reason Launchpad is initially geared toward small and medium-sized businesses, at least for now.
“Today, it’s zero to one,” Gratton said. “We’re serving someone who has nothing and wants to build something.” The co-founder noted that Launchpad is also relevant for existing companies looking to innovate quickly and spin up new product lines without splitting the focus of their existing teams.
There are many low-code AI developer tools currently available as vibe coding has moved swiftly into the mainstream. But Gratton believes these tools fall short for businesses looking to build something secure, supported, and scalable.
“These tools hit a limit. You build something, it’s cool, it looks like it works, but you are not confident enough to actually put this live in production and have real customers using it, because you have no idea what’s under the hood,” he added.
Gratton said Launchpad’s AI-assisted process is meant to offer a different level of accountability. Its developers remain responsible for what gets delivered, including testing, documentation, security review, and ongoing managed DevOps support.
“We won’t accept poorly designed code or security flaws that an AI would not necessarily consider on its own,” he said.
Gratton believes software agencies are entering a period where speed alone will no longer be enough. As AI tools level the playing field for founders to produce early prototypes on their own, he said agencies will need to prove they can match that speed while ensuring the output is a product people can actually trust.
He said AI has already quadrupled the velocity of Chrono Innovation’s own team, while also reinforcing the importance of experienced engineers who understand how real products break, scale, and get maintained.
“We use this tool. We understand the reality and the complexity of working with multiple tech stacks, multiple customers, different constraints,” Gratton added. “I think the mix of our internal expertise bundled into a product will be hard to replicate.”
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Image courtesy Chrono Innovation.