A Foundation Years in the Making<\/strong><\/p>\n The founders of safecubed spent more than a decade working together on safety-critical engineering projects before launching the company. When their previous employer ceased operations, the team faced a decision. A customer who trusted their work chose to continue the relationship, creating an opportunity to build something of their own. \u201cWe have a customer, and we have an opportunity. Let’s take it and let’s try to build something of our own,\u201d recalls Nico Ondracek, co-founder and CEO of safecubed.<\/p>\n That entrepreneurial leap reflected a mindset the team had shared for years – focus on solving problems, not simply checking boxes. The same philosophy continues to shape how safecubed approaches safety-critical development today.<\/p>\n In the functional safety space, process documentation and compliance activities often become major areas of focus. safecubed takes a different approach. While the team understands the importance of standards and certification requirements, they believe those processes should support engineering and not just create additional work.<\/p>\n \u201cProcesses are necessary, but we don’t write a 300-page validation plan,\u201d says Ondracek. \u201cWe say for instance: for this specific project, testing on unit, software integration and system level really give a benefit. And we argue and document this in five pages.\u201d The goal is not to minimize documentation, but to focus effort on the activities that improve product quality, safety, and certification readiness.<\/p>\n Built on Deep Technical Expertise<\/strong><\/p>\n Many companies turn to safecubed when they discover that building a functional product and certifying it are two very different challenges. “The functions are working, but then they hit a wall,” Ondracek explains. ” They need to provide a complete set of documents, proofs that their concepts hold in all situations and a final safety validation \u2013 and we help them to achieve this.\u201d<\/p>\n Addressing those gaps requires more than simply understanding standards and regulations. The team prides itself on its deep technical expertise and brings more than 15 years of experience developing safety-critical embedded systems.<\/p>\n Ondracek shares, “We really take big pride that we’re not just consultants.” Rather than stopping at recommendations, safecubed works alongside customers to solve the engineering problems behind certification roadblocks. The team reviews system architectures, develops safety concepts, strengthens verification strategies, and works directly on the embedded software itself.<\/p>\n That expertise extends beyond software. With strong backgrounds in electronics engineering, the team understands how software behaves on target hardware and how those interactions influence the safety and reliability of the final product. “My colleagues all have a very strong electronics engineering background, so they really can check what the code is doing on the hardware,” says Ondracek.<\/p>\n This combination of functional safety expertise and practical engineering knowledge helps customers move from working prototypes to certifiable products. The company’s expertise in Model-Based Design and safety-critical development recently led it to join the MathWorks Connections Program<\/a>, where it provides consulting services to MATLAB and Simulink users.<\/p>\n Simplifying Safety-Critical Development with MATLAB and Simulink<\/strong><\/p>\n Model-Based Design plays an important role in many of safecubed’s customer projects. The team uses MATLAB and Simulink to support development, testing, verification, and certification activities for safety-critical applications.<\/p>\n For teams pursuing certification, one of the biggest advantages is an integrated development workflow that helps connect requirements, implementation, and verification activities. “With the workflow that Simulink and integrated tools provide, there is not much software related safety management left because this is already a fully implemented process for software development,\u201d describes Ondracek.<\/p>\n Beyond modeling, the team uses MATLAB and Simulink to automate testing, manage product variants, and maintain traceability across the development process. A key advantage of the approach is the ability to connect model-based development directly to embedded implementation. According to Ondracek, “With a properly set up tool chain, you can just reuse your test cases and run them again completely on the target hardware.”<\/p>\n The team’s expertise extends beyond model creation. They understand what happens after code generation and how generated software behaves on target hardware, helping customers move efficiently from design to deployment.<\/p>\n Expanding into Cybersecurity<\/strong><\/p>\n While functional safety remains a core focus, safecubed is now helping customers address growing cybersecurity requirements. The company’s newest product, EMBAR<\/a> (Embedded Architecture), was developed in response to Europe’s Cyber Resilience Act, which introduces new cybersecurity requirements for software and embedded systems across a wide range of industries.<\/p>\n According to Ondracek, many organizations have spent years improving their functional safety processes and are now facing a similar learning curve with cybersecurity. EMBAR is designed to help companies meet those requirements without fundamentally changing the systems they have already built.<\/p>\n safecubed develops fully tested Simulink models and provides the safe and secure EMBAR platform to execute them on the target hardware. Image courtesy of safecubed.<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n EMBAR software provides cybersecurity building blocks that customers can integrate into existing applications without extensive redesign. “If you just integrate two components of EMBAR into your software, you can avoid big changes to your own code,\u201d explains Ondracek. \u201cThen you have an ECU that you can still use after the Cyber Resilience Act is fully in place.”<\/p>\n For safecubed, EMBAR represents an important milestone as the company expands outside of consulting services. “That’s very thrilling for us. It’s our first product,” Ondracek says.<\/p>\n Building the Future as a Small Team<\/strong><\/p>\n As a six-person founding team, balancing customer projects with investment in new technologies has been an important part of safecubed’s growth.<\/p>\n The MathWorks Startup Program has played an important role in enabling that growth, giving the team access to the tools they need at a cost that works for an early-stage company. “We wouldn’t have bought MATLAB for ourselves if it weren’t for this startup program,” shares Ondracek. The program allows the team to continue investing in internal development while serving customers across multiple industries.<\/p>\n For Ondracek, however, the most rewarding aspect of building safecubed remains the freedom to solve problems in the way the team believes is best. He concludes, “We really enjoy taking important decisions on our terms and based on our own experience. I think we can deliver very good and quick results in that way.”<\/p>\n As the company prepares to launch EMBAR, that engineering-first mindset remains at the center of everything safecubed does. Whether helping customers navigate functional safety requirements or prepare for emerging cybersecurity regulations, the team’s focus remains the same: solving complex engineering challenges and helping customers build safer, more reliable embedded systems.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For companies developing safety-critical systems, building a working product is only part of the challenge. 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