An AI product studio in Auckland, focused on practical software.
Think and Form Limited is a New Zealand AI product studio. We build and operate our own software products across beauty, sport, heritage, local marketing, and construction: RunChair, goSmash, HeriTrail, HereFlick, thinkingPM, and CostCoda. Each one combines industry understanding, systems thinking, and modern software execution. We also take on a small number of client builds with the same team.
Founder-led, close to the work.
Anil DongreFounder, Think and Form Limited
Anil is a technical founder focused on applied AI for specialist software. He builds systems that combine video, vision models, and language workflows to turn messy, real-world input into decisions people can act on. He leads the studio from Auckland, and its six products in construction, sport, beauty, heritage, and local marketing are the ground truth behind everything we ship.
We work small on purpose. Clients get a senior pair of hands on the strategy, the architecture, and the build, not a pitch deck and a junior team.
Four principles behind the work.
Ship calm software
Software for a business should lower decision-load, not raise it. Quiet defaults, clear flows, and screens that don't make people guess.
In practiceHereFlick suggests three post ideas a week and publishes nothing until the owner approves it.
Build in the industries we work in
We operate products in construction, sport, beauty, heritage, and local marketing. The same people who advise on a problem have to live with the answer in their own products.
In practiceRunChair runs the front desk for hair and beauty businesses, the industry it was designed around.
AI is a tool, not the product
We use AI through the stack: prompts, pipelines, agents, and reviews. The thing we ship is still software that fits a workflow. The AI just makes the build faster and the product smarter.
In practiceCostCoda reads quotes and invoices and cites the page it read; a named person approves anything contractual.
Stay small on purpose
Small teams stay close to the work. We do not chase headcount; we chase clear thinking, sharp scope, and honest delivery on each project.
In practiceHeriTrail publishes no cultural protocol text for Māori sites until mana whenua have reviewed it, rather than filling the gap to ship faster.
Why these industries.
We are not generalists. We work in industries where we either operate our own product, or have a clear technical opinion on where the existing tooling falls short.
Site mess, hand-written schedules, and the gap between plan and reality. Construction tooling rarely catches up to how the work actually flows on the ground. We build for the field, not the boardroom. thinkingPM and CostCoda, both in development, are our products in this space, so we live with the same constraints we design for.
Salons sit between retail, healthcare, and craft. Generic booking software treats them like restaurants: same tool, different industry. It is not the same job, and the difference shows up in missed calls, no-shows, and retention. RunChair is built for how salons actually run, from the phone to the chair.
Coaches need decisions, not data dumps. The best performance tools turn footage into next-session changes: what to drill, what to ignore, what to come back to in two weeks. goSmash is our run at that for badminton; the same patterns apply across sports.
What is known about a place is scattered across archives, council registers, museum collections, and the knowledge held by iwi and hapū, and none of it is where the place is. The work is as much about protocol as software: who may publish what, and who reviews it first. HeriTrail is where we are learning that, one site at a time.
Most useful app ideas in New Zealand are too small for VC-scale software but too important to leave to spreadsheets. That gap, between off-the-shelf SaaS and a full in-house engineering team, is where a lot of our client work lives.
Interested in a product, a pilot, or working together?
Messages come straight to Anil Dongre, the founder. Ask about a product, join a pilot, or bring a problem worth building for.
Or email admin@thinkandform.co.nz