The duo behind Ultima acquisition Just After Midnight (JAM) are aiming to go “one better” with an AI start-up that helps businesses put vibe-coded AI products into production.
Sam Booth and Kris Croucher today unveiled Messy Works.
They founded cloud services provider JAM in 2015 before building the business to 40 staff and £4.5m revenues and selling it to Ultima (now Trustmarque Ultima) in 2021.
“We think this could be a bigger business than we built before,” Booth told IT Channel Oxygen.
“It’s the unsexy bit of AI.”
“It’s going to be the next big thing for MSPs”
Booth characterised Messy Works as “part platform, part managed services provider”.
“The whole idea of Messy Works is to put AI-built products into production safely and securely,” he explained.
“If someone’s vibe-coded or used AI to assist their development of a new product or piece of software, we have a gated methodology it goes through to give people a stamp at the end to say it is production ready.”
Messy Works will then manage the code in either its own containerised hosting platform or the client’s own cloud environment.
“This ability to provide a trust layer, governance layer and compliance layer on top of what people are building, quickly and effectively – I think it’s going to be the next big thing for managed services providers,” Booth said.
It can be “very hard” for established MSPs to focus on “cutting-edge” technology, Booth claimed.
“These problems have only really existed in 2026 – maybe the latter end of 2025. These kind of trust issues are brand new,” he said.
Israeli security firm Red Access recently scanned 380,000 vibe coded apps and found that around 2,000 had no authentication at all, Booth stressed.
“That’s something that wasn’t a problem 12 months ago,” he said.
“We want to go one better”
UK- and Malta-based Booth and Australia-based Croucher worked together building websites and apps for agencies before setting up JAM, where Booth remained CEO until 2024.
“Kris has been a co-collaborator for many, many years,” Booth said.
The completely self-funded business starts life with around five staff.
“We’re using AI to do a lot of things we would potentially have employed people to do before. That allows us to hire the absolute best engineers we can, but have slightly fewer of them,” Booth said.
The duo bided their time before launching Messy Works, Booth stressed.
“I wanted to get into something to do with AI, but I wanted to wait and see rather than jumping in too early,” he said.
Messy Works will aim its services at midmarket businesses that want to “get creative with technology”, Booth said.
“Messy Works has a very niche, focused proposition around one thing and doing that one thing extremely well, and that’s what we did with JAM,” he said.
“I don’t think it’s any secret we sold JAM for tens of millions last time. We want to go one better, and I think we’ve got the skills and the experience to do so.”
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
