What do SpaceX, Google, and Albany High School have in common?
Tech startup Superluminal.
The Albany-based company draws on the experience its members gained working at major tech companies like SpaceX, Google and SoundCloud — along with their original shared experience on the robotics team at Albany High School — to combine software development and physical product development.
They're aiming to be a one-stop shop for software and hardware.
"That's probably where we're kind of most dangerous is where software and hardware come together," Augustus Rivera, partner, product and design lead, said.
Sebastian Sarbora, managing partner, said traditionally those two sides are separate teams that are subcontracted out by a company with an idea — meaning one team would develop the physical product, while another created the software. Then, the software and the hardware need to be integrated. At Superluminal, both are developed at the same time.
For example, Superluminal worked with Xenon-VR, a company developing a virtual reality headset used to conduct eye exams. The company wanted to shop out each aspect, and originally it approached Superluminal just looking for an electrical engineer. Instead, Superluminal offered the whole package.
"That really proved out our value pretty early on," Sarbora said. "They were looking to try to piecemeal find and manage this whole big team, all these different people from all these different places. And we already all know how to work together, we already know how to build these products, because we've been doing it for years at different companies and working together well."
Brothers Sarbora and Rivera, as well as Superluminal co-founder Aaron Perl, previously worked together at the Troy startup Ilium VR, which shut down in 2017. The team went their separate ways until three years later.
Since Superluminal's conception in 2020, the company has grown from three to six full-time employees who all work remotely.
The company is looking to grow even more in the future; Sarbora said they want to double their staffing in the next few years. They're also looking to develop their own product offerings instead of just catering to client requests.
"We can do things internally that provide a lot of leverage for us going forward with other clients, which is also fun, but kind of a differentiator, I think, for us, and maybe your sort of typical run-of-the-mill consulting firm," Rivera said.
The combined experience of the staff at larger Silicon Valley tech companies comes with scalable skills they can offer clients. Rivera said. For example, working on apps used by millions of people taught them to evaluate risk, a skill that carries over to the startup level.
In the future, Superluminal hopes to work with students at Albany High School, where five of the six employees attended high school together and competed in FIRST Robotics.
"We're kind of entered into a stage sort of more globally where great tech doesn't have to happen just in San Francisco. And so we want to be a part of bringing innovation and developing talent outside of that area," Rivera said. "The Capital Region is an area that's important to us, it's where we grew up and stuff. So it's really nice to be able to help foster that a little bit, in even a small way to help bring up the community."
