# About Cloudless Labs

> Cloudless Labs is a Sydney consultancy founded in 2019 by Nicolas Dao, a cloud and AI engineer who still writes the code. We take a business vision from the boardroom to production: the spec, the architecture, the AWS infrastructure, the AI, the tests and the telemetry, and every client has hired us back.

- Founded by Nicolas Dao (https://nicolasdao.com): two decades building software, the last 15 years of them in the cloud
- Contact: nic@cloudlesslabs.com
- Web page: https://cloudlesslabs.com/about/

## In numbers

- **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. (https://nicolasdao.com)

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. (https://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](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/brief.md), 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](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/index.md) are where they came from, and [how we work](https://cloudlesslabs.com/about/how-we-work/index.md) 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.

## Related

- [Projects](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/index.md): all 13, by industry, with outcomes
- [How we work](https://cloudlesslabs.com/about/how-we-work/index.md): the standards every system is held to
- [Services, testimonials and FAQ](https://cloudlesslabs.com/index.md)
- [Map of every Markdown file on cloudlesslabs.com, with what each one answers](https://ask.cloudlesslabs.com)