01
The seams are where products die
Between enclosure and board, between model and firmware, between app and platform. Every seam is a place for two vendors to disagree about whose problem it is. We removed the vendors.
About
Engineering from Ivrea, shipped from Los Angeles
LucaLab is the studio Luca Capula builds through — the place where the hardware, the models and the platform belong to the same team on purpose.
Luca Capula
The short version, without the résumé voice
Born in Ivrea — the Olivetti town, where Italy learned to build computers and then learned what happens when it stops. That is a useful place to grow up if you want to take engineering seriously and take nothing for granted.
Computer Engineering at the Politecnico di Torino, Marketing and Communication at the Università degli Studi di Torino, and a Master in Marketing at IED. The combination explains a lot: he has never accepted that the people who build the thing and the people who explain it should be different people.
Senior management at GPS Standard, the family perimeter-security manufacturer, where he led its first home-automation programme. Then ALYT, which he founded and still runs as CEO — a home hub whose intelligence stays in the house. And Ad Astrum, his company, for the work that does not fit either label.
He lives between Torino and Los Angeles, which mostly means he is awake for both.
He has been building connected things since long before they were called edge AI, which is the only reason he is so unsentimental about it.
What the studio believes
Four convictions, earned expensively
02
Local is not nostalgia
Running intelligence on your own hardware is not a retreat from the cloud; it is the arrangement that gets cheaper, faster and more private every time silicon improves. We think it becomes the default.
03
A demo is not evidence
Anything works once, on the good network, in the nice lighting, with the person who built it holding it. We build for the bad week, and we write down what is still broken.
04
Hardware makes you honest
Software forgives; a bill of materials does not. Once a decision has a part number and a lead time attached, the conversation gets dramatically more truthful — which is why we like it.
Elsewhere
He also writes
Luca keeps a personal blog — technology, travel, food, and running local models on his own machines, written at greater length and with fewer commercial obligations than this page allows.
Say hello
Luca reads everything that arrives here.
Projects, advisory, speaking, partnerships, or an argument about where inference belongs — all welcome, all answered by a person.