Albert Santalo started his professional career as a working software engineer in a bank processing company at the age of 18, while also attending the University of Miami’s College of Engineering. After 11 years as a developer and technical manager, he joined the early team at AnswerThink Consulting Group in 1997 (now, The Hackett Group).

AnswerThink went public in 1998, and Albert spent four years as a management consultant, assisting large US companies with their IT strategy and IT transformation initiatives. He later co-founded Avisena and founded CareCloud in Miami. Both companies provide healthcare IT solutions to U.S.-based medical practices and are backed by over $10 million of Miami-based angel investment and over $100 million of Silicon Valley venture capital.

In 2016, Albert left the day-to-day at CareCloud to pursue an idea he had been thinking about for at least a decade. Up to that time, he had been a part of so many software development efforts. Each had felt fractured, variable, and frustratingly expensive.

He knew there had to exist a way to make software efforts happen faster, better, and cheaper. Albert understood that 50-80% of the code developers write doesn’t directly support business-specific use cases; it goes into non-unique systems and infrastructure management.

There had to be a way to shift developer focus to real innovation. He was especially passionate about making a non-technical founder’s journey an easier one. Today, tech ventures are springing up more than ever, and non-technical founders start most of these. These people need help, absent a technical co-founder, in constructing their products correctly the first time around.

Beyond helping entrepreneurs, Albert realized that trillions would be spent in the coming years as companies confronted digital transformation. Given this enormous need, however, there were not enough developers in the world to accommodate all the necessities.

This vision led to the formation of 8base on March 15th, 2017. Albert worked to bring on the founding team and raised $1 million of angel investment. At this time, 8base also established an offshore office in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

The team broke ground on the software development effort in August 2017 and entered beta release in October 2018. Around that time, the 8base Labs team secured its first engagement and began building on behalf of a startup, collabtogrow, on the 8base Platform.

In April 2019, 8base secured IBM Global Services as a customer. IBM has been using 8base to build software for a sizeable quasi-government organization in Europe. In late June 2019, 8base entered general availability. Today, developers around the world are signing up at www.8base.com and utilizing the platform for hundreds of different projects in various industries.

The 8base Labs Team is also hard at work building applications on behalf of customers – both entrepreneurs and established companies. The 8base name comes from 8’s significance in computer science (8 bits in a byte), the fact that 8 is infinity turned sideways, and that 8base is a data-”base”-first platform.