About
Engineering critical systems since 2014.
A tight core of engineers, designers, and leaders. A vetted bench of specialists we bring in mission-by-mission. NASA-grade discipline applied to whatever you’re building next.
Leadership
The people on every brief.
Founder of Concept to Cloud. Ten years at NASA JPL building cloud platforms for missions that couldn’t afford to fail, including the backend behind PIXLISE on the Mars Perseverance rover. Sets technical and strategic direction across every engagement.
Read Tom’s full bio
Director of Product at Concept to Cloud. Astrophysicist by training with work in atmospheric science at NASA, then crossed into product to build directly for the people research was for. Runs product management, UX, and design across every engagement.
Read Amelia’s full bio
Engineering Manager at Concept to Cloud. Specialises in AI system design and Python data pipelines. Runs the engineering team day to day, keeping delivery on track and code shippable.
Read Juan’s full bio
The team
A tight core. A deep bench.
Under us sits a team of 15, engineers, data scientists, change management leads, security engineers, domain experts. Around them, a vetted bench of contractors and specialist partners we bring in for the shape and depth a specific mission needs.
NASA doesn’t staff every mission the same way. Neither do we. The same people don’t run every project; the right people run each one. The core stays accountable end to end.
Our story
From Spicule to Concept to Cloud.
What Tom and Amelia share is an instinct for missions that benefit others, solving the problems most teams take for granted, building for the people downstream, doing work that quietly makes things better. Mars systems, atmospheric science, the systems your business runs on; the venue changes, the instinct doesn’t.
Concept to Cloud began as Spicule Data, founded by engineers who had spent years building mission-critical systems for some of NASA’s most ambitious projects. We were the team behind the cloud infrastructure for the PIXL instrument on NASA’s Perseverance rover, processing scientific data from Mars in real time.
Working on Mars landers and fusion energy research taught us something crucial: complexity is the enemy of reliability. At NASA, we couldn’t afford to experiment with unproven technologies when lives and billion-dollar missions were at stake. We learned to build systems that hold up under extreme constraints, limited budgets, tight timelines, zero room for failure.
As we transitioned from aerospace to working with companies, we saw the same problems everywhere. Teams burning through budget while “figuring things out.” Agencies shipping code that breaks under real load. Internal teams building custom solutions for problems that AWS, GCP, and Azure already solved.
So Spicule Data evolved into Concept to Cloud, an advisory and engineering practice with one mission: helping companies launch new products and modernise legacy systems without years of trial and error. Whether you’re a funded startup racing to market or an established business accelerating innovation, we bring proven patterns that work, the same rigour, the same focus on boring-but-proven tools, the same bias toward simplicity that kept rovers running on Mars.
What we believe
Principles forged in mission-critical engineering.
01
Principles outlast technology
Tech changes every quarter, agentic AI, new frameworks, new databases. Stability, security, reliability, maintainability don’t. We pick the tech that serves the timeless principles, whether that’s PostgreSQL or an LLM agent. The principle is the constant; the tech serves it.
02
Speed without sacrificing quality
Fast delivery doesn’t mean cutting corners. It means ruthlessly eliminating work that doesn’t deliver value. We’ve launched NASA systems in months, not years, your product can move just as fast.
03
Knowledge transfer, not dependency
We’re not here to create vendor lock-in. We document everything, train your team, design systems small teams can operate. You should own your infrastructure, not rent it from us.
04
Cloud-first by default
Let AWS manage your database scaling. Let Auth0 handle authentication security patches. Your competitive advantage is your product, not your DevOps expertise. We architect for managed services first.
05
Design for scale from day one
“We’ll scale it later” is how you end up with a $200K rewrite at 10K users. The right architecture costs the same to build initially but saves months of painful migration down the road.
06
Flexible engagement models
Whether you’re planning around funding rounds or quarterly budgets, we engage in 6-month increments aligned to your financial cadence, scaling up or down as priorities demand. Flexibility without sacrificing momentum.
Our NASA heritage
Before building startups, we built systems for Mars.
Tom built the cloud systems behind NASA’s PIXLISE on the Mars Perseverance rover. Amelia worked on NASA TC4 and SE4CRS, atmospheric science missions trying to understand the planet we live on. Different sides of the same NASA discipline; one looking out at Mars, one looking down at Earth.
PIXLISE, Mars Perseverance Rover
We built the cloud backend for NASA’s PIXL science instrument, reducing processing time from 30 hours to 10 minutes. Runner-up for NASA Software of the Year 2023.
Mission-critical systems engineering
Years of experience building systems where failure wasn’t an option, from fusion energy research to international space missions requiring 99.99% uptime.
Data-intensive applications
We’ve processed terabytes of scientific data from space missions, built real-time analytics platforms, and designed data architectures that handle billions of events per day.
Delivery under extreme constraints
At NASA, launch windows don’t move for software delays. We learned to ship production-ready systems on fixed deadlines with zero room for failure, skills we bring to your business.
4
Major space missions
50+
Expert associates network
How we work
Engagement models for modern business realities.
$8,000 · 10 business days
MVP Diagnostic
Compresses three months of architecture thrashing into ten days of focused decision-making. You walk away with a buildable plan, defensible architecture, and a fixed price for the build.
See package detail$40,000 · 3 weeks per sprint
Build Sprint
Production-ready code in three weeks. Auth, core flows, CI/CD pipelines, deployment, everything you need to start onboarding real users immediately.
See package detail6-month engagements
Aligned to your budget cadence
Building something complex? We engage in 6-month increments aligned to your budget cycles, funding rounds or fiscal quarters. Scale our involvement up or down as priorities dictate while maintaining momentum.
Knowledge transfer
Baked into every engagement
Every engagement includes comprehensive documentation, architecture diagrams, runbooks, and training. Your team should be able to maintain and extend the system independently after handoff.
Where we’re based
Global reach. Local expertise.
We’re headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, just minutes from Washington, D.C. and the heart of the government technology corridor. The location gives us direct access to advanced engineering talent and keeps us connected to aerospace, defence, and scientific computing.
We work asynchronously, west coast to Europe and beyond, with everyone from early-stage startups to enterprises modernising their platforms. Time zones don’t slow us down.
US
+1 858 633 9955
UK
01403 907 817
HQ
Alexandria, VA
Send Tom a few lines.
Whether it’s a 10-day diagnostic to validate an MVP plan or a multi-sprint build to launch the product, he reads every brief and writes back honestly.