A new home in Lublin, and SALZ21 in Salzburg

The first months of 2025 brought two changes of scenery for EMBIQ. In Lublin our team moved into a new office on al. Kraśnicka, and in early March we travelled to Salzburg for SALZ21, this time for the second year running on the Silicon Alps start-up stand.

Neither event is spectacular on its own. Together they say something about how we work in 2025: a compact, flexible base in Poland, a growing presence in Austria, and more time spent listening to the companies we want to work with.

A new home on al. Kraśnicka

Since 1 March our Lublin team has been working from a serviced office at al. Kraśnicka 27, after moving out of our previous office on ul. Gęsia. We signed the agreement in December 2024, and in February, before we had even moved in, we extended it with a second room for the team.

The choice of a serviced office was deliberate. Our team works from several cities, and what we need in Lublin is not a large floor of fixed desks but a place that can grow and shrink with our projects: desks for the people who come in every day, meeting rooms for planning sessions and client workshops, and a reception that takes care of the rest. Lublin, where EMBIQ was founded, remains our home base, and the new office makes it easier to bring people together when it matters.

Graz: close to our Austrian clients

The Polish move goes hand in hand with our Austrian side. EMBIQ GmbH in Graz is where many of our conversations with Austrian and German companies start, and our partnership with the Silicon Alps Cluster keeps opening doors to the regional electronics and industrial community.

In practice, projects run across both locations. Discovery workshops and client meetings often happen in Austria; development, QA and long-term maintenance run from Poland. For clients the difference is invisible: one team, one project plan, and the option to contract with the Austrian or the Polish company.

SALZ21 and SALT'N'VENTURE in Salzburg

SALZ21, held on 5 and 6 March at Messezentrum Salzburg under the motto people, technology and future, brings together industry, technology providers, start-ups and investors. This year's focus topics were artificial intelligence, green tech, the circular economy and digitalisation. On 5 March we shared the Silicon Alps Cluster's joint stand with four other companies from the cluster's start-up community, just as we had at SALZ21 in 2024.

The same day, Startup Salzburg ran SALT'N'VENTURE, its start-up and investment conference, as part of the fair. We were selected for the Investors Walk in the EnterpriseTech, E-Commerce & Logistics track: investor groups move from stand to stand, and each company has about ten minutes for a short pitch followed by questions and feedback.

People sometimes ask why a company that has been building software for many years stands among start-ups. The answer is simple: we have worked with and for start-ups for most of our history, we have seen both great successes and painful failures, and we like to share that experience with founders early, especially on the software side of their concepts. Many of today's start-ups will be tomorrow's product companies.

What we talked about

• Firmware for small connected devices. One conversation, which we are now continuing in Graz, was about extending the firmware of an off-the-shelf smart-home energy meter so that it stores consumption history and draws charts directly on the device. On a microcontroller with a few megabytes of flash, fitting everything into memory is the real engineering challenge. We have done similar work before, for example in smart city and IoT solutions for energy efficiency.
• Engineers on demand. A hardware company from the cluster was looking for mobile developers to strengthen its own team, which is exactly what our staff augmentation is for.
• Partners for young companies. The founder of a small creative agency was looking for a technical partner for the software side of client projects, from the first concept to maintenance.

What 2025 looks like from here

Talking to manufacturers and technology companies in Salzburg confirmed what we see in our own projects. Two things are on almost everyone's mind this year.

The first is regulation for connected products. From August 2025 the cybersecurity requirements of the Radio Equipment Directive apply to many wireless devices placed on the EU market, and from September the Data Act starts to apply, with new rules on access to data generated by connected products. Companies that build devices, or bring them to Europe from abroad, are asking what this means for their firmware, apps and cloud services. We described the wider context in our post on bringing a non-EU product to Europe.

The second is AI moving from experiments into everyday work, both in the products our clients build and in the way our own engineers work. We will write more about that later this year.

Come and visit

If you are in Lublin, drop by our new office on al. Kraśnicka. If you are in Austria, we are just as happy to meet in Graz. And if we met at SALZ21 and have not yet followed up, get in touch.