STRAW/HAT/TECH

LANC. Keystone, state symbol of Pennsylvania PENNA.

{A} MISSION

Steward the public good by building practical, adaptable, and responsible socio-technical systems.

{B} WHO WE ARE

Straw Hat Technology is a public interest technology studio based in Lancaster Pennsylvania. We combine expertise in behavioral and social sciences with years of experience building scalable solutions for public sector clients.

{C} WHO WE WORK WITH

We work with state and local governments, non-profits, international organizations, and civic tech startups to design and build impactful software systems.

{D} WHAT WE DO

We build responsible AI systems for government and public institutions, bridging the gap between robust engineering and measurable public impact.

End-to-End AI/ML Engineering We build and evaluate production-grade systems, primarily in Python, Go, and Elixir. Our expertise spans LLM-enabled systems like RAG and document intelligence as well as traditional machine learning, entity resolution, and information retrieval.
Technical Advisory & Capacity Building We work with you to define your technical strategy and help you build the internal capacity to sustain it. We consult on architectural design, system feasibility, and evaluation and can advise on how to hire, structure, and scale technical teams.
Impact Evaluation & Applied Research System accuracy is just the baseline. We focus heavily on rigorous post-deployment evaluation to measure whether your AI systems actually drive the real-world outcomes you care about. We ground all of our impact assessments in peer-reviewed academic rigor to ensure responsible and validated deployments.

{E} CONTACT

Reach out to ben@strawh.at to start a conversation.