why rudis
Why “Rudis”
In the Roman empire, the rudis was a wooden sword given to a gladiator who had earned his freedom. A lot of owners are still in the arena: waiting days for numbers, doing by hand what a system should do. Rudis is about handing that freedom back.
I'm Michael Langlinais.
I've been the owner trying to figure out if I could afford the next inventory order. The answer was spread across three apps and a spreadsheet.
So I built my way out. I pulled shipping, payments, and operations into a centralized source of truth and replaced the spreadsheet with a live dashboard. I built a forecast that tied inventory to cash flow, so buying decisions stopped being guesses. I automated fulfillment with workflow tools and AI agents, and built an early chat tool for asking my own data questions in plain English.
Before that, I did the same work at a bigger scale, in prior roles in oilfield services and natural gas compression. I've worked across organizations big and small. Working with finance, operations, accounting, developers, data engineers and scientists, all the way to the field guy entering the data.
