A co-founding partnership, not a vendor relationship.

The problem

India's physical stores, the overwhelming majority of its retail economy, have almost no digital presence beyond a map pin and a phone number. Photos don't sell a saree shop or a jewellery counter. Video does. But no platform existed to give a store owner a video-first storefront without an agency and a budget.

Context

VDOlocal's founding team knew the market cold; what the venture needed was a technology partner who could build the hard part. The shared research settled the core bet: store owners will produce video if the tooling makes it effortless, and buyers browse video the way they browse a market street, by walking it. Instead of a services contract, Sitio Labs and VDOlocal formed a CTO Partnership: Sitio Labs builds the technology stack and drives the roadmap; VDOlocal owns the technology, the market, the brand, and the merchant relationships.

What we built

• ✓Platform architecture — end-to-end system design, the storefront platform, and merchant tooling
• ✓Mobile engineering — consumer and merchant mobile apps, designed and shipped by the studio
• ✓AI systems — the layer powering video-first discovery and merchant workflows
• ✓Infrastructure & scale — hosting, deployment, observability, and cost discipline, owned end to end
• ✓IP strategy — five patents filed where the work broke genuinely new ground

Stack

• Platform architecture (web)
• Mobile (iOS + Android)
• AI systems for video-first discovery and merchant workflows
• Infrastructure, hosting, and observability
• [CONFIRM: specific frameworks, languages, and cloud provider — not published for this venture]

Timeline

[CONFIRM: engagement start date and duration to date]

Results

What they said

[CONFIRM: customer or founder quote — none on file for this case study yet.]