Gareth Huggins wants small businesses to have a technical partner they can trust

At the start of December, if the plan holds, The Link Network will launch with an event for celebrities and influencers. It is a network where vetted UK businesses meet celebrities, influencers, mentors and investors. There is no joining fee: a free tier and a premium one, and for now every member is vetted and approved by a person, a step the team intends to automate as the platform grows. Around Christmas its doors are due to open to members. Behind the launch is a platform Gareth Huggins, its technical partner and a member of its board, committed to deliver, and kept delivering after the developer he had lined up walked away, and then the next one did too.

The founders came to him with a business idea, a waiting list and no technical team. They sent voice notes. He turned them into a solution architecture and a delivery plan, written up in January 2026, and committed to deliver the platform on a fixed scope, with a developer lined up to build it alongside him. By his own account, the plan then fell apart twice: that developer withdrew in the week after the client deal was agreed, and a second left part-way through the build. Huggins carried on. The answer came from his contracting years. A contact from the conference circuit got in touch on LinkedIn; he works at a family-run development agency with its engineers in India, and the agency took on the engineering to Huggins's design. Huggins reviewed what came back against his own requirements and development standards with help from his software factory, and kept the final say over what went live. Eight months of reviewed code later, the platform is built and running, the launch is in the diary, and the two sides are planning more projects together.

That is what he means by a technical partner: someone who takes responsibility for getting an idea to the point where it is built, and stays until it is live. For a startup it is the difference between a pitch deck and a product. Huggins thinks tradespeople and sole traders deserve the same thing, at a size and a price that fits them, and in the space of a year he has set about proving it: a startup's platform carried to the brink of launch, a run of high-street businesses put online, and a software factory built to take on the next ones. That is what his businesses are for.

A career spent keeping other people's systems honest

Huggins came to all this through infrastructure and databases. Defence was an early setting, and it taught him that the context around a system decides what data may be handled and how. Virtualisation and the move to the cloud led him into database administration and consulting, often as the first or only DBA in the building, across healthcare, payments, utilities and financial services. Whatever the sector, the job was the same: protect the data, keep the service dependable, and make change practical for whoever has to run it on a Monday morning. The people he did it for noticed. David Owen, who managed him at NHS Wales Informatics Service, wrote in a public recommendation that he "demonstrated exceptional knowledge of SQL Server" and "would not hesitate to offer Gareth permanent or contract employment in the future".

SQLOPTIMISE is that experience offered as a service: a consultancy for organisations that run SQL Server and need it to be secure, fast, affordable and manageable all at once, rather than one of those at the expense of the others. Its most personal product is aDBA, an automated SQL Server administrator assembled from the tools, scripts and open-source components he used in his own DBA work over the years. It is built to run thirty health checks across fourteen areas of a server's health, but nothing it finds is fixed until someone opts in, and an audit trail records everything the system did, deferred or blocked. It is the same rule his software factory would later run on: the machine prepares, a person decides, and the record shows who decided what. He is preparing aDBA for release.

The thread running through the career is a dislike of technology that is sold to people who cannot see inside it. Suppliers, he argues, can profit from a customer's limited understanding. He would rather the owner of a taxi firm or a tattoo studio understood exactly what they were buying.

Miaigi: a digital architect for the high street

Miaigi, his second business, is where that idea meets the high street. It designs and builds websites and systems for independent businesses in two ways. Where a need is common, the build starts from one of Miaigi's ready-made website kits rather than a blank page. Where it is not, the client gets a fixed-fee discovery and a written blueprint first, so the owner sees the plan before paying for the build.

The first clients arrived by word of mouth, from the towns around Farnham and Fleet: a family taxi firm whose site takes quote requests; a fire-safety and electrical contractor who, in Miaigi's telling, had just gone independent and wanted a site as professional as his work; a single-artist tattoo studio; a martial-arts club. Each of those sites carries a small "Crafted by Miaigi" mark. None of them is a large job. All of them are the kind of job that small businesses usually get done badly, or not at all, because nobody technical was in their corner.

The factory

Sofakingsoft is the third business and the least visible: an AI-assisted software factory that, for now, works only for the other two. Its control room is a console Huggins calls the Mothership. Every piece of engineering starts as a GitHub issue. A scout agent investigates it, a scoper plans it, an engineer builds it, a validator checks it, and the issue carries a label at every stage so anyone can see where it sits. The agents have job titles and a daily log, and Huggins has given himself the lowliest title of all. His LinkedIn entry for the factory lists him, deadpan, as its "Janitor": "the only human employed in a fully autonomous AI-powered software factory", there to keep the lights on. It is satire, at his own expense, and the serious point sits underneath it: the agents do not have the final word.

Four things are never done by an agent alone: moving money, speaking to a client, merging into a client's site, and publishing. An agent can prepare any of them; a named person decides, and the decision is recorded. On the Link Network the factory's part was review: it helped check the developers' code before he merged it. This summer it built its first client site end to end, for a family heating firm. The firm had come to Miaigi after, in Huggins's telling, its previous web provider refused to hand over its own website unless it paid a fee; the factory built it a new one, now live on the firm's own domain. It is exactly the kind of case he set Miaigi up for. Two more sites, for a construction consultancy and a personal-training studio, are in build with go-lives planned for late October.

The idea is older than the factory. In June 2023 he pitched an AI-powered platform for IT professionals at the AI Summit London's accelerator competition, a Dragon's Den-style pitch to a paying audience; the factory is what that idea became once the tools caught up. Its internals are closed for now, and offering it to other businesses is an ambition rather than an offer. Its job in 2026 is narrower and more useful: to let one experienced engineer give a dozen small firms the attention usually reserved for much larger clients.

What keeps him going

It has been a hard year as well as a busy one. Huggins's father died suddenly this year, while the startup build was under way. It was a great shock. His father was an entrepreneur who believed strongly in helping people less fortunate, and Huggins chose to keep going in his honour, wanting to make him proud and knowing, he says, that his father already was. His partner's love and support carried him through what followed.