The challenge
Keltrafy had raised $4.2M to build a digital marketplace connecting Calgary commercial landlords with vetted contractors for building maintenance and energy retrofits. The two co-founders — both from commercial real estate — had strong industry relationships and a waitlist of 60 landlords, but no technical co-founder and no codebase. They'd been quoted 6+ months and $300K+ by agencies, and their investors were expecting a working product in 4 months to start generating revenue before their next raise.
Our solution
We acted as their fractional engineering team for 16 weeks. Starting with a 2-week discovery phase, we mapped their core user flows (landlord posts job → contractors bid → Keltrafy facilitates matching and payment), then built the platform iteratively in 2-week sprints. We chose Next.js with TypeScript for the web app, PostgreSQL for the database, Stripe Connect for contractor payments, and deployed on Vercel with a serverless backend. We built a landlord portal, contractor dashboard, job bidding system, in-app messaging, payment processing, and an admin panel for the Keltrafy team. We also set up analytics tracking so they could measure marketplace health from day one.
The impact
“We had the industry relationships but no engineering team. Kavora built our entire marketplace from scratch in 14 weeks — and it was better than what agencies quoted us 6 months for. We hit $38K MRR in our first quarter.”