Concept to Cloud

Concept to Cloud is a senior-led product engineering firm that builds MVPs and production products for companies in regulated industries: fintech, healthcare, private equity and research. The people who scope the work are the people who ship it.

We started in 2014 as Spicule Data, engineers who spent a decade building mission-critical systems at NASA JPL. Our best-known work is the cloud backend for PIXLISE on the Mars Perseverance rover, which cut processing from 30 hours to 10 minutes and was runner-up for NASA Software of the Year 2023. We bring the same discipline to commercial products: every system ships with a tested answer for how it breaks and how you recover.

How we work:
Assess (1–2 weeks, $8K–$50K): a fixed-price read of your product, from interface to infrastructure, ending in a costed plan.
Build (from $40K per 3-week sprint): production-ready MVPs and products, with auth, core flows, CI/CD and deployment, ready for real users.
Embed (from $12K/month): fractional and interim engineering and product leadership that stays on after launch.

Recent work includes a research data platform for Princeton that cut research cycles 4–8×, an audit-ready sanctions-compliance platform now used by 20+ financial institutions, and a financial-crime detection engine for Consilient whose deployment time dropped from weeks to about a day. We also maintain Saiku, the open-source semantic layer used by data teams since 2009.

Offices in New York and Alexandria, VA, with coverage from 8am to 10pm ET.