About Tamarillo
Why Tamarillo exists
Danish companies need more data work done than they can hire for. A senior data engineer takes six months or more to find, and most platform projects need both a senior person to make the calls and a volume of build work that in-house teams do not have spare.
Tamarillo was founded in Copenhagen in January 2026 to close that gap: senior Danish leadership on every engagement, with a trained team in Kigali doing the build. Danish companies already run software teams in Kigali. Tamarillo does the same for data engineering, with a senior Danish lead in charge of the work.
The company is at an early stage, and that is a deliberate choice for the clients we work with now. Early clients get founder-level attention, and getting those engagements right matters more to us than the margin.
Kjetil Erdogan Lavik
Founder and lead
Kjetil has spent ten years in Danish data and analytics. At Lundbeck he co-designed the company's governed data platform as Senior Solution Architect and ran it as Head of Data & Platform Engineering, leading 7 in-house engineers and 3 to 10 external consultants. The platform was taken into use one business problem at a time: commercial first, with one set of sales numbers across 70+ markets and daily recommendations into the CRM in more than 10 countries; then manufacturing and supply chain, where SAP data modelled once let the analytics team build its own reports and predictions; then large research datasets. By 2025 it integrated 70+ source systems, held 3,000+ data models, and served more than 1,000 users, in a validated state under GAMP 5.
Before Lundbeck, he did data engineering at Statens Serum Institut, where he built the automated backend for national influenza and COVID-19 surveillance, and data analysis at Rigshospitalet.
Stack. Snowflake, dbt, Python, dimensional modelling, platform architecture
Awesomity Lab
The engineers who build for Tamarillo come from Awesomity Lab in Kigali, a software firm with a Service Excellence Award in IT outsourcing and production systems for European and African clients. Their public work includes Cool Sheep AI for NSFO in the Netherlands, a machine learning system that predicts a lamb's weight from an ordinary photo; a platform for OX Delivers in the UK that collects operational data from electric vehicles in daily use; Move by Volkswagen in Rwanda, the country's first large-scale mobile app, with more than 100,000 rides in under a year; Harambee in South Africa, moving candidate data from a large number of Excel files onto one platform; and ongoing work with NL-IX, a Dutch internet exchange.
Before any Tamarillo work, five of the engineers completed a three-month data engineering programme that Kjetil designed and taught, covering SQL, Snowflake, dbt and Terraform. The team holds certifications from Anthropic.
Where this is going
Tamarillo is growing into a boutique consultancy of senior Danish data platform engineers, each leading the design and development of data products, migrations and platforms with a delivery team behind them. Kjetil is the first of those leads.
Advisory board
Kjetil has spent ten years building data pipelines and platforms. Building a company around them is a different craft, and three people have been generous with their time, their experience and their honest pushback while he learns it. Together they make up Tamarillo's advisory board.
They come from shipping, biotech and fintech, and all three have built and scaled organisations far bigger than Tamarillo.
Tomas Dyrbye
27 years at Maersk, former CEO of Safmarine
Tomas spent 27 years at Maersk, including as country manager for India, CEO of Safmarine and Group Senior Vice President. He has built and run large organisations across three continents, and he is helping us lay the same kind of foundations as Tamarillo establishes itself as a company operating in both Denmark and Africa.
Lasse Nørregaard
Biotech founder and CEO, board member at Danish Bio
Lasse is a biotech entrepreneur and founder who has held C-level roles across several companies and sits on the board of Danish Bio. He has been part of raising funding for several biotech companies and knows what it takes to turn a strong idea into a sustainable business. He helps us translate what Tamarillo can do into value for the company and for our clients.
Third advisor
Serial entrepreneur, data and AI lead in Danish fintech
Our third advisor prefers to stay out of the spotlight. He has co-founded several companies, with three successful exits behind him, and today he leads data and AI product development in a large Danish fintech company. He knows what it takes to move a large organisation from strategy to delivery, and he is helping us sharpen how Tamarillo does that for its clients.
Working with Tamarillo
If you want to talk about how this would work for your team, write to us.
Kjetil Erdogan Lavik, contact@tamarillodata.com, Copenhagen, Denmark
Kjetil Erdogan Lavik
Copenhagen, Denmark