About Winspeed.ai | Meet the Founders: Tim Gratton and Nicolas Appave

How Winspeed started

Winspeed came out of a simple observation. We kept hearing the same thing from businesses across Europe, Australia, and Asia: "We want to use AI, but nobody can actually ship it for us."

There are plenty of people who can talk about AI. Fewer who can build it. Fewer still who can also run the infrastructure it sits on, manage the product roadmap, and handle the commercial side at the same time. That gap is the reason we started Winspeed.

Tim has spent 25 years keeping production systems running for businesses across Europe. Nicolas has spent over a decade turning marketing teams into AI-powered delivery machines at enterprise scale. We combined both into one team.

We stay small on purpose. Smaller team, faster decisions, direct ownership of every line of code. That is the model.

The Team

Meet the founders

Tim Gratton and Nicolas Appave, co-founders of Winspeed

Co-founder

Tim Gratton

Infrastructure & Operations

Tim has been running production systems since the late 1990s. From Windows NT and Novell NetWare through modern cloud infrastructure, he has kept web, email, and backend systems running for businesses across Europe for the better part of 25 years.

He founded a hosting and IT services company in 2010 that still manages infrastructure for small and mid-sized businesses today. That business is where he sharpened the discipline of keeping things online: server setup, optimization, security hardening, patching, and the kind of unglamorous reliability work that quietly lets everything else move fast.

His work has always spanned more than just infrastructure. Over the years he has shipped large-scale web crawlers, custom payment gateways with multi-language invoice matching, billing systems integrated with banking APIs, and whatever glue code a stack happened to need. He is the kind of engineer who can debug a networking issue in the morning and refactor a frontend component in the afternoon.

At Winspeed he brings the discipline of someone who has spent two decades watching systems fail and learning exactly why. Every service we ship sits on that foundation: monitored, patched, and built to keep running. When a product needs to work for real users at real scale, that experience is the difference between a demo that looks good and a system that is still online next year.

15 years running production infrastructure

Linux, Nginx, MySQL, Docker, the full stack

Custom billing and payment automation

Has fixed a lot of broken things at 2am

Co-founder

Nicolas Appave

Product & AI Delivery

Nicolas is a French-Australian marketing leader with 15 years building and scaling teams for global consumer brands and B2B companies across Asia, Europe, and Australia.

He has run marketing across portfolios of enterprise brands including Accor, IHG, Radisson, Holiday Inn, Rydges, Best Western, Hard Rock Cafe, and Central Group, covering everything from brand positioning and go-to-market through to paid media, content, and demand generation. Along the way he has owned multi-million dollar marketing budgets, led 40-person cross-functional teams, and launched consumer brands from zero to multimillion-dollar revenue.

When generative AI broke through, he was one of the first marketing operators to treat it as real infrastructure rather than a talking point. While most of the industry was still writing LinkedIn takes, he was already shipping with Claude Code and the broader AI tooling landscape, building agentic workflows, internal tools, and production systems that enterprise teams actually use. He speaks regularly at industry summits on responsible AI adoption.

At Winspeed he handles the product thinking, the AI design, and the commercial side. Show him a business and he sees the manual workflows that could be compressed, the data moves that could five-times the output, and the product wedge nobody else has bothered to look for.

15 years in marketing across APAC, EU, and AU

Led marketing for Accor, IHG, Radisson, Hard Rock Cafe, Central Group

Regular speaker at industry summits on AI adoption

Builds agentic workflows with Claude Code and modern AI stacks

Why Winspeed

What you actually get

Three things separate us from a typical agency engagement.

Senior people, no handoffs

You get Tim and Nicolas on every call. There is no pitch team that hands you off to a delivery team that hands you off to a support team.

AI that actually ships

We have moved a long list of AI projects from idea to production. We know what breaks, what scales, and what never should have been built in the first place.

Marketing, engineering, and infra in one team

Most AI projects fall apart at the seams between strategy, build, and operations. We cover all three under one roof.

Two operators. One clear philosophy.