About us.
A two-person consultancy with the hands-on depth of a much bigger team. The person you talk to about your business is the person who designs, builds and runs it.
- 2019
- Founded in Sydney. 7 years of client work, and counting.
- 15+
- Years of Nic's two decades in software spent in the cloud.
- 100%
- Of our clients have hired us back.
- 2024
- All-in on agentic AI. Claude Code on every client project.
The people
Nicolas Dao
Founder and managing director. Cloud, AI and software engineering.
Nic is an engineer first. He has a Master of Electrical Engineering from the University of Liège, specialised in machine learning and computer vision, and has spent two decades building software, the last 15 years of them in the cloud. He spends his days between executives and code: in the meeting where the vision is set, and in the terminal where it's built. He's obsessed with AI, and builds with it every day.
Lin
E-learning and instructional design, through shirleenwong.com.
Lin runs our e-learning practice. She designs and builds the courses that companies and government agencies train their people with, from the needs analysis to the SCORM package, and her clients' reviews on our home page say the rest.
Who we are
Cloudless Labs is small on purpose. There's no account manager between you and the engineer, no junior team learning on your budget, and no handover from the people who sold the project to the people who build it. You talk to Nic about the business, and Nic designs it, builds it, ships it and keeps it running.
That's possible because of how we work. Agentic AI multiplies what one experienced engineer can deliver: Claude Code writes much of the code, under a spec, a design and tests that a human owns. The experience is what tells the agent what to build, and spots when it's wrong.
From the boardroom to production
Most technology projects fail in translation: the executives describe an outcome, and somewhere between that meeting and the code, the outcome gets lost. Our best work happens exactly there. We spend time with CEOs and leadership teams to understand what they want the business to do, then turn it into a specification, a technical design and an architecture that a board can approve and an engineer can build.
That's why our clients come back. Every one of them has hired us again.
Hands-on, and proud of it
Nothing on this site comes from slide decks. The opinions in The Stack, the gotchas and the prices come from systems we've built and run in production: migrations, cost cuts, real-time data, neural networks, serverless platforms, AI agents. The projects are where they came from, and how we work is the standard we hold each one to.
Industries
Agriculture technology
IoT sensor networks, real-time ingestion, machine-learning weather forecasts, and the internal tools that make the data usable.
Finance
Wealth-management tools for a financial planning firm, and market analysis and trading research in crypto.
E-commerce
An e-commerce platform built from scratch in the United States: checkout, discounts, refunds, US sales tax and scaling the APIs behind it.
Marketing technology
Cloud and data work for a marketing business.
Media
The Australian Financial Review, at Fairfax Media.
Enterprise software
A CRM built by a startup whose biggest customer was DHL.
Why you won't find our clients' names here
Our clients trust us with their infrastructure, their data and their bills. We don't turn that trust into marketing. Every project on this site is real and described as it happened, with the client named only by what they do. References are available on request, under NDA, once we've talked about your project.
Selected work
- 01 Off a fragile VPS and onto AWS, with almost no downtime An Australian agriculture-technology company with a large IoT sensor network · Agriculture technology A growing agtech platform ran on a single server that could neither scale nor be secured. I moved all of it to AWS, live, with almost no downtime, then rebuilt it to scale.
- 02 Cutting an AWS bill from US$240k a year to under US$40k An Australian agriculture-technology company with a large IoT sensor network · Agriculture technology · In progress An agtech platform was paying about US$240,000 a year for AWS. The programme under way takes it under US$40,000: roughly US$200,000 a year back in the business, for the same workload.
- 04 Deep neural networks that forecast the weather An Australian agriculture-technology company with a large IoT sensor network · Agriculture technology Machine-learning models and deep neural networks, trained on the company's own sensor data with GPUs on Amazon SageMaker, to predict the weather where its customers farm.
- 07 Wealth-management tools that predict returns and test portfolios An Australian financial planning firm · Finance Tools for a financial planning firm to track clients' wealth, project returns, and compare strategies against market indexes, balanced portfolios and rebalanced ones.
- 09 HappySkills, the package manager for AI agent skills Our product · AI developer tools My own product: a registry and CLI that gives AI agent skills what code has had for decades, dependencies, a lock file, sync and team sharing, all driven by talking to your agent.
- 12 An e-commerce platform built from scratch in California A US e-commerce startup based in California · E-commerce As director of technology at a US e-commerce startup, I built its platform from the ground up and led teams in Australia and India: checkout, discounts, refunds, US sales tax and APIs that scale.
Let's talk about your project.
Tell us where the business needs to go. You'll talk to the engineer who will design and build it, not a salesperson, and get an honest answer on whether we're the right fit.