About Novastra
Built by an engineer who'd rather
show you the system running
than the slide deck describing it.
Riley Ball started Novastra because he kept seeing the same pattern: businesses would engage an AI consultancy, get a beautiful slide deck, and then nothing would actually make it to production.
The problem is usually the same. The people who understand the business don't understand the engineering, and the people who understand the engineering treat every project like an academic exercise. The result is a lot of promising demos that never survive contact with real data, real users, and real infrastructure constraints.
His background is in building things that have to work. Aris Detect -- the SaaS platform he built and runs -- processes drone-based property inspections for real inspectors who depend on it daily. It includes ML-powered damage detection, GPU inference pipelines, real-time collaboration, and autonomous AI agents that handle bug triage and code review 24/7.
“If your problem doesn't need AI, I'll tell you. If it does, we'll find the simplest approach that actually works.”
That experience shapes how he approaches consulting. Start with the problem, not the technology. Build for production from day one -- not “we'll worry about deployment later.” And stay involved through deployment and beyond, because shipping is where the real value is.
Riley Ball
Principal AI/ML Engineer
Brisbane, Queensland
The best AI projects are the ones where someone says “I didn't know that was possible” — and then uses it every day.
How we think about AI consulting
Start with the problem, not the model.
If your problem doesn't need AI, I'll tell you. If it does, we'll find the simplest approach that actually works.
Build for production from day one.
No throwaway prototypes. Everything we build is designed to deploy, scale, and maintain.
Practical over impressive.
A system that saves your team 10 hours a week is worth more than a cutting-edge model that's too fragile to run unsupervised.
Stay until it works.
I don't hand off a repo and disappear. We work together until the system is running in production and your team knows how to maintain it.
Tools of the trade
What we actually work with.
Not a buzzword bingo card. These are the tools and frameworks we use daily in production.
Based in Australia
Same timezone. Same context.
Working with someone who understands Australian business culture, regulatory context, and time zones makes everything simpler. No midnight standups, no lost-in-translation requirements.
Ready to talk about your project?
It starts with a conversation. Tell me what you're working on, and I'll tell you straight whether I can help.
Start a conversation