During their last year of university in 2017, Dylan McKee and Nic Flynn, two computer scientists from Newcastle Upon Tyne launched their very own software house – Nebula Labs. The company specialises in developing mobile apps, web platforms, and tailored software solutions for start-ups, forward-thinking small enterprises, and government organisations.
Both Dylan and Nic started developing software when they were teenagers. At the age of 13, Dylan released his first iOS app, myAltitude. With more than 1 million downloads worldwide, myAltitude was an overwhelming success. Nic ran his first public server – a Minecraft multiplayer games instance – when he was 15 years old. The two entrepreneurs then met at school. As both of them already enjoyed providing mobile and API development solutions as freelancers in their spare time, they decided to focus on doing more of this work together.
Photo credit: Nebula Labs
They participated in Newcastle University’s START UP Foundership programme that awarded them funding and access to a co-working space. Three years later, Nebula Labs has scaled up from a two-people business operating in co-working cafés to a full office counting seven collaborators. Today, they provide a broad set of services and top-quality digital solutions. Their work includes location-based and real-time apps, data-driven platforms, and artificial intelligence chatbots – but what they really love to do is help solve real-world problems.
One of their first major successes was getting the innovative Gym Plan app for iOS featured as the ‘App of the day’ on Apple’s App Store. With this feature, Nebula Labs boosted its customer reach in more than twelve countries in a short amount of time. Dylan and Nic’s team developed the app for the personal training start-up Fit Gurus. Notably, it was among the first apps to support the new Siri Shortcuts module of iOS 12. This function provided a highly personal experience for each user, with the ability to record voice commands for specific tasks within the app itself. This innovation was rewarded with enormous success and Gym Plan now counts over 400,000 downloads.
Today, Nebula Labs’ niche market is the location-based industry. For example, they worked with Nexus, the local light rail transit system, to deliver an innovative smart ticketing mobile app. The app includes ticket purchasing via Google Pay, and real-time train information (RTI). Nebula Labs also created its own in-house event apps. Using Swift and Apple’s latest augmented reality kit (ARKit 3) technology, these apps provide even more interactive and exciting user experiences. For the Newcastle Startup Week, Nebula Labs created a unique heat mapping tool displaying the areas of Newcastle populated by festival attendees. The heat map used real-time location data, and pseudo-anonymously tracked user movements. To ensure user anonymity, Nebula Labs rigorously tested the bespoke algorithm to ensure that the precise real-time location of users was sufficiently obfuscated.
In the future, Nebula Labs is excited to further collaborate with universities and other partners. They want to explore the potential that location-based technologies offer to improve sustainable transportations and city planning.
Newcastle Upon Tyne is a fast-moving tech hub with a strong start-up community. With the UK leaving the European Union, Dylan is concerned about reduced funding possibilities for entrepreneurs in the British tech sector. Particularly in North East England, many projects heavily rely on the European Investment Bank. You can read more about what the UK’s exit from the EU means for small business here.
Nebula Labs’ success stems from their ability to combine the ‘start-up way of doing things’ with unique agility in their business processes and solutions. Dylan and Nic’s story is a great example of the opportunities the app economy provides for innovative developers. We are delighted to have Nebula Labs as a member and looking forward to continuing to work with them in the future.