Backbone by Calon·Accepting early design partners

Your CEO is asking about AI.
Your data foundations aren't ready.

Backbone generates a production-ready data warehouse, semantic layer, and MCP server from your business ontology. So the AI tools your company wants to use have something clean and well-documented to work with.

See how it works

You've done the smile.

A senior leader comes back from a conference. They've heard about agents that write pipelines, about Claude Code, about how AI is going to do the whole thing end to end. And by the way: why isn't your team already doing this?

So you smile. You say you'll look into it.

Then you go back to your desk. Back to the warehouse the last team built and the last team understood. Back to the three definitions of revenue that have coexisted in production for longer than anyone wants to admit. Back to the finance team reconciling in Excel because nobody trusts the numbers in the dashboard.

The pressure to do more with AI is real. The foundations that would make AI useful don't exist yet. And nobody in that conference room is going to help you build them.

What changes

Before

The Monday morning dashboard

You open the margin dashboard and spend 2 hours cross-checking against finance's spreadsheet before the CEO sees it. Last month the German entity was off by €180K because a cost file arrived late and the ETL silently loaded zeros.

After

The Monday morning dashboard

You open the dashboard at 9am and trust it. Margin is defined once in the ontology. When a cost file arrives late, last week's numbers don't change; this week's incorporate the correction with a full audit trail.

Before

“Which revenue?”

The CMO Slacks you: “Your dashboard says Q1 revenue is €34M. Finance says €31M. The board deck is due Friday.” You spend two days tracing the gap through 4 layers of logic. Both numbers are “right” by their own definitions. Neither is authoritative.

After

“Which revenue?”

Revenue is defined once, in the ontology. The warehouse, semantic layer, and every report are generated from that single definition. There is no second interpretation because there is no second place where revenue is calculated.

Before

“Why can't we use AI?”

The CEO has seen Claude query a database. “Why can't we do this?” You know why: your main table has 150 columns, 10 of which say “revenue.” If the LLM picks the wrong one, the CEO gets a confident, wrong answer. You say “we're working on it.”

After

“Why can't we use AI?”

You connect the Backbone-generated MCP server to Claude. The semantic layer tells the LLM which column is net revenue, which is gross, which is marketing-attributed. The CEO asks a question and gets a correct, sourced answer.

Before

The acquisition

The company just acquired a brand. Different ERP, different chart of accounts, 20-year-old on-prem database. Your team estimates 4–6 months to integrate. Meanwhile 30% of group revenue is invisible.

After

The acquisition

You map the acquired entity against your existing business ontology. Same KPI definitions, same dashboards, live in weeks. The CEO sees consolidated group performance for the first time.

How Backbone works

Start with the business

Define what decisions matter before a line of SQL gets written. Backbone's ontology layer captures your metrics, entities, and relationships. Starting from the business, not from tables.

Generate, don't maintain

The warehouse is generated from metadata. Not code your team writes and then has to maintain, debug, or explain to the next person. Data Vault foundations, integrated views, business vault. All generated.

AI-ready from day one

The semantic layer and MCP server are generated automatically from the same ontology. Your AI tools get clean, documented context: definitions, lineage, source-of-truth. No separate 6-month project.

Why it holds up in year two

Your stack, your control

Data stays in your Snowflake. Code lives in your Git. No black box, no vendor lock-in. If you ever walk away, the warehouse stays. We're not a platform you depend on. We're a backbone you own.

Built for acquired brands

Multiple ERPs, conflicting chart of accounts, different naming conventions. The ontology resolves integration at the business level, not the table level. Designed for consumer goods companies that grow by acquisition.

Governance on autopilot

Metric definitions, data contracts, and logic ownership encoded in metadata: version-controlled, traceable, generated into the warehouse. Governance that runs because it's structural, not because someone maintained a wiki.

“Getting the numbers right is a non-negotiable — we need it to make the decisions that drive profitable growth. I can't put a number on it.”

CEO, 600-person global consumer products group

Built on 28 years of data platform experience across global FMCG, industrial, and retail. Dozens of builds. We encoded what works.

Transparent from the start

Platform

From €1,000/month

Data Vault warehouse, semantic layer, MCP server. Generated from your business ontology.

Forward-deployed engineers

~€1,500/day

Our engineers work alongside yours to get the foundations right, upskill the team, and sort out governance and definitions.

The real comparison

3–6 months of custom data engineering to build what Backbone generates in weeks. Your team focuses on the 5% that's genuinely unique to your business, not the 95% that's standard.

Ready for when the CEO walks back in the room?

That moment is coming. We're working with a small number of design partners at scaling consumer goods companies. Enter your email and we'll be in touch about early access.