About Custos Media Technologies
At Custos, they want to provide a globally effective way to combat media piracy by tracing a leak to its source in a decentralized way using cryptocurrency. As soon as the Bitcoin reward is claimed, content owners are notified that a leaked copy of their content has been discovered as well as the identity of the person who was entrusted with that specific copy. The team has grown to cover various experts in the fields of watermarking technology, the economics of piracy, and the use of decentralized systems and the Bitcoin blockchain.
Last updated May 13, 2026
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Custos Media Technologies Reviews
Write a ReviewA technology investment that delivered returns ahead of the business case we approved
Zofia Kamińska / CTO - Odra Tech StudioMay 23, 2026
Project summary: The project had a board-facing delivery date tied to a strategic initiative. We needed a partner who would treat that date as their own, not ours.
What made the most difference in practice was the quality of the engineering judgment on this team. Not the ability to execute a specification — that is a baseline expectation. The ability to recognise when a specification was suboptimal, explain why, propose an alternative, and support the client in making a decision about it. That consultative dimension elevated the output beyond what the brief described and resulted in a product that is more fit for purpose than the one we had originally specified.
Clear and consistent communication adapted appropriately for both technical and non-technical stakeholders, shared tooling that gave our team real-time visibility, reliable sprint delivery throughout
The quality of documentation they produce means our team needed to set aside dedicated review time to do it justice — a minor scheduling point rather than a genuine criticism
Questions & Answers
Technically rigorous, commercially grounded, and a genuine pleasure to work with
Aoife Brennan / VP of Product Engineering - Emerald Digital LtdMay 10, 2026
Project summary: Rapid growth had created a skills gap on the platform engineering side of our business. We needed an experienced partner to close that gap while our internal team scaled, without compromising quality or timeline.
I came into this engagement as a sceptic. We had been through a failed implementation with a previous vendor and I had high standards for what evidence of competence looked like before I would trust a partner with our core systems. This team earned that trust progressively — through the quality of the discovery documentation, the rigour of the technical proposals, the consistency of the sprint deliveries, and ultimately the stability of the production system. I no longer lead with scepticism when recommending them.
Collaborative culture that made the team feel like a genuine extension of our organisation, strong asynchronous communication across time zones, zero-drama handling of the inevitable mid-project changes
Time zone coordination required some deliberate overlap management from both sides in the first couple of sprints, after which we had an efficient async rhythm that worked for the whole project
Questions & Answers
Headless CMS that finally allowed our designers and developers to work in parallel
Hyun-Su Lim / Director of Platform - Hanam Tech SolutionsApr 28, 2026
Project summary: The project had a board-facing delivery date tied to a strategic initiative. We needed a partner who would treat that date as their own, not ours.
I came into this engagement as a sceptic. We had been through a failed implementation with a previous vendor and I had high standards for what evidence of competence looked like before I would trust a partner with our core systems. This team earned that trust progressively — through the quality of the discovery documentation, the rigour of the technical proposals, the consistency of the sprint deliveries, and ultimately the stability of the production system. I no longer lead with scepticism when recommending them.
Commercially transparent throughout — no hidden assumptions, no bill shock at the end, change requests that were fair and clearly explained rather than used as a margin-recovery mechanism
Time zone coordination required some deliberate overlap management from both sides in the first couple of sprints, after which we had an efficient async rhythm that worked for the whole project
Questions & Answers
Project execution that matched the proposal in every dimension that mattered
Reuben Loh / CTO - Marina Bay Ventures Pte LtdApr 09, 2026
Project summary: Digital-first buyer behaviour had made our property search experience a genuine competitive liability. We needed it to match the quality of the portfolio it was representing.
The integration layer was the part of the project I was most concerned about going in. Our system landscape is complex, several of the upstream APIs we relied on were poorly documented, and two third-party vendors had a history of unpredictable response times on integration questions. This team managed all of that. They documented what the upstream vendors could not, built resilience into the integration architecture where the upstream behaviour was unreliable, and delivered a solution that works as specified in production. I could not have asked for more.
Collaborative culture that made the team feel like a genuine extension of our organisation, strong asynchronous communication across time zones, zero-drama handling of the inevitable mid-project changes
Their insistence on a detailed functional specification before development began felt like friction at the time. In retrospect, it was the reason the development phase ran without the ambiguity that has derailed similar projects for us previously
Questions & Answers
The team understood mobile-first thinking before we finished the brief
Imogen Tanner / Head of Engineering - Outback Data SolutionsMar 20, 2026
Project summary: Several years of incremental development had left us with a platform that was technically functional but strategically limiting. A structured rebuild was the agreed path forward.
The project brief was ambitious and we had received proposals ranging from two to five times our eventual budget from other vendors. This team came back with a proposal that was commercially realistic and technically credible — and then delivered against it. That alignment between proposal and outcome is not something I take for granted. I have been on the other side of it enough times to know it requires both honesty in the sales process and discipline in delivery. We experienced both.
Collaborative culture that made the team feel like a genuine extension of our organisation, strong asynchronous communication across time zones, zero-drama handling of the inevitable mid-project changes
Their discovery process is more rigorous than we were accustomed to and required more preparation from our side than we had initially allocated — but the quality of what followed justified every hour of it
Questions & Answers
Delivered on scope, on time, and with code quality that passed our strictest review
Declan Hartley / Chief Digital Officer - Southern Cross TechnologyMar 16, 2026
Project summary: Evolving open banking obligations required us to rebuild our API layer from the ground up. The architecture needed to be compliant by default, not bolted on after the fact.
What made the most difference in practice was the quality of the engineering judgment on this team. Not the ability to execute a specification — that is a baseline expectation. The ability to recognise when a specification was suboptimal, explain why, propose an alternative, and support the client in making a decision about it. That consultative dimension elevated the output beyond what the brief described and resulted in a product that is more fit for purpose than the one we had originally specified.
Commercially transparent throughout — no hidden assumptions, no bill shock at the end, change requests that were fair and clearly explained rather than used as a margin-recovery mechanism
We underestimated the input required from our subject matter experts during the requirements phase. The team flagged this early but our resource planning did not fully reflect it — our responsibility, not theirs
Questions & Answers
Technically rigorous, commercially grounded, and a genuine pleasure to work with
Nathan Prescott / VP of Technology - Ironclad Insurance GroupMar 08, 2026
Project summary: Our internal product thinking was strong but our execution capability in this specific technology domain was limited. We needed depth, not generalism.
The technical quality of the final deliverable is the easiest thing to point to. The automated test coverage is thorough, the deployment pipeline is reliable, the documentation is genuinely useful rather than ceremonially produced. But the metric I keep returning to is the number of post-launch conversations we have not had to have. No incident calls at two in the morning. No emergency patches. No retrospective discussions about what went wrong. The absence of those events is the evidence I would show to someone considering this vendor.
Collaborative culture that made the team feel like a genuine extension of our organisation, strong asynchronous communication across time zones, zero-drama handling of the inevitable mid-project changes
Time zone coordination required some deliberate overlap management from both sides in the first couple of sprints, after which we had an efficient async rhythm that worked for the whole project