Operating partner · AI value creation

AI that moves
the revenue line. Hands on.

Operating partner for growing and portfolio companies — AI strategy, product repositioning, and revenue growth with hands-on execution. We stay until the outcome is delivered.

3.5×
MRR growth in two years — $150K to $530K+
$6M+
ARR at a 5M-user consumer platform, through to exit
30%
MRR lift from a pricing redesign, proven by A/B
20 yrs
of AI & engineering leadership — Amazon, Sony

Trusted by

Amazon Sony Deloitte Nokia Qt Verisk
Anton Chernov
Anton Chernov Founder & Operating Partner

About

A builder, a P&L owner, and a partner.

AI and engineering executive who operates as a builder, P&L owner and value-creation partner. Two decades of turning technical depth into commercial outcomes — tripled revenue to $6M+ ARR at a 5M-user consumer platform through product-market repositioning and pricing redesign, then exited. Directed AI organisations at Amazon and Sony. INSEAD-trained in strategy, leadership, and private equity.

Chernov Consulting works with investors and growing companies as an operating partner — walking into a portfolio or growth-stage business, assessing the technology organisation, identifying where AI is the growth lever or the bottleneck, and driving the product and commercial decisions that move the revenue line.

INSEAD Global Executive MBA ’27 Co-founder, Ænima Labs LinkedIn

Services

Three levers. One outcome.

From JTBD-driven product discovery and pricing model redesign to AI platform architecture and team rebuilds.

01

Revenue & Product Value Creation

  • JTBD discovery and product-market repositioning
  • Pricing model design and A/B experimentation
  • New revenue stream identification and launch
  • Data-driven growth playbooks with measurable outcomes
02

AI Transformation & Platform

  • AI strategy and build-vs-buy decisions
  • LLM integration, RAG systems, and agentic workflows
  • Cloud-agnostic ML platform architecture
  • MLOps, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure at scale
03

Technology Assessment & Team Leadership

  • Technical due diligence for investors and acquirers
  • Engineering organisation assessment and restructure
  • Interim CTO / CPO / Head of AI mandate
  • Hiring, team culture, and engineering leadership development

How we build agents · 2026

Agents, engineered.

Most AI agents fail in production for the same four reasons. These are the patterns we design with to prevent them — drawn from Kodama, a real-time voice agent we build at Ænima Labs.

01They make people wait.

Answer now, think in the background.

The part that talks never waits for the part that thinks. Slower work — recalling, checking, planning — runs alongside and hands over notes when they are ready.

Replies at the speed of conversation, even by voice.

02They forget.

Rebuild what it knows, every turn.

Before each reply, the agent gathers exactly what it needs within a fixed budget — and room for the safety rules is always kept. Long-term memory has a single, careful writer, and every entry keeps its source.

Consistent behaviour across hour-long sessions.

03They make things up.

Cite a source, or say so.

Answers about your business come from your own documents, found by searching for both words and meaning. Every claim points to where it came from; when nothing does, the agent says it doesn't know.

Answers your team can check — and trust.

04Nobody can tell why.

Test before shipping. Record every turn.

Every model or prompt change is scored against a set of real cases before it goes live. Prompts are versioned, and each turn records what it used — so any answer can be traced back.

Changing a model is a measured decision, not a gamble.

Tools we reach for

  • Go · ADK
  • LiveKit · WebRTC
  • Whisper · Piper
  • SQLite FTS5 · embeddings
  • Postgres
  • Cloud Run
  • Ollama on Apple Silicon
  • Anthropic · OpenAI · Gemma
Build an agent with us

Featured work

Outcomes, not slideware.

Hands-on value creation across consumer platforms, enterprise AI, and frontier research — from tripling portfolio company revenue to production ML systems at Amazon scale.

Revenue growth visualisation

Operating partner · Consumer platform

Consumer Platform Revenue Transformation

Joined as Partner and CTO at a 5M-user consumer platform, co-owned the P&L, and tripled monthly recurring revenue from $150K to $530K+ ($6M+ ARR) in two years. Levers: JTBD discovery, pricing model redesign (30% MRR lift via A/B), new revenue streams, and data-driven experimentation. Full cycle — from engagement to equity to exit.

$150K$530K+MRR
  • Product Strategy
  • Revenue Growth
  • Data Analytics
  • A/B Testing
  • P&L
RAG system for professional publishers

AI for Professional Writers

Professional publishers needed AI-powered search across large document collections. A Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) system — complete data ingestion with cleaning, chunking, and embedding for vector-based similarity search — went from concept to production-ready deployment with full CI/CD within weeks.

  • Python
  • OpenAI/GPT
  • Elastic Search
  • GCP
  • RAG
The Learning Robot

The Learning Robot

A robotic arm that sees, tracks faces, and learns in real time — deep neural networks running on embedded devices, built on Apache MXNet in collaboration with The Qt Company. Edge computing meets computer vision. The demo generated 30+ enterprise leads at Embedded World and attracted new open-source contributors.

  • Deep Learning
  • MXNet
  • Computer Vision
  • Robotics
  • C++
Healthcare AI and wearable sensors

Healthcare AI for Wearable Devices

Elderly care patients wearing sensor-equipped devices needed real-time fall detection — with models that adapted to each individual wearer over time. A healthcare AI platform streaming wearable sensor data, with self-retraining models running from embedded C++ on-device to cloud services. 0-to-1, from research to production.

  • Healthcare AI
  • Wearables
  • Embedded C++
  • Self-Retraining ML
  • Edge AI
Financial fraud detection

Financial Fraud Detection

Real-time transaction analysis to catch financial fraud before it causes damage. A machine learning system processing transaction streams, identifying anomalous patterns, and flagging suspicious activity — production AI protecting business-critical financial operations.

  • Fraud Detection
  • Machine Learning
  • Real-Time Analytics
  • Financial AI
MLOps orchestration tools on Kubernetes

MLOps: Orchestration Tools on Kubernetes

Which orchestration tool should your team pick for ML pipelines on Kubernetes? A comparative analysis of Airflow, Prefect, Kubeflow and more — based on hands-on production experience across enterprise engagements. The article became a go-to reference for teams evaluating MLOps tooling.

  • MLOps
  • Kubernetes
  • Airflow
  • Prefect

Guiding principles

How we work.

Excellence in AI and engineering requires more than technical skills. These principles guide how we work and deliver exceptional results.

Be cool

Exceptional people are neither ordinary nor dull. They strive to find a niche for their unique abilities and work to inspire others.

“If you've gotta think about being cool, you ain't cool.”Keith Richards

Move fast

Exceptional people focus on progressing towards set business goals in small iterations. This allows them to be flexible and change direction where needed while keeping a sporty, enduring pace.

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.”Richard Feynman

Balance

Exceptional people know that almost every hard decision is an act of balance. That's why we ride the wave.

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”Albert Einstein

Elevate quality

Exceptional people have very high standards. They shape high-quality products, services and processes with exceptional, often unexpected quality.

“My tastes are simple: I am easily satisfied with the best.”Sir Winston S. Churchill

Always learn

Exceptional people are never done learning and always seek self-improvement.

“There is only one good — knowledge, and one evil — ignorance.”Socrates

Build trust

Exceptional people are honest with themselves and others. They value the strength of people's relationships over robustness of systems. They try to be helpful, instead of trying to be right.

“People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.”John C. Maxwell

Work with us

Let's move your revenue line.

Whether you are an investor looking for technology due diligence, a portfolio company that needs an operating partner, or a growth-stage business with an AI value-creation challenge — reach out.

info@chernov.io

Chernov Consulting OÜ

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info@chernov.io