About us

Founding idea

The company was founded in 2015 to host web based software development tools for one of our customers, the German Society for Data Protection and Data Security (GDD e.V.), the german society for data protection and data security. They haven’t allowed us to process personal data outside of Germany and at that moment there was no other firm who offered the whole toolset we needed.

External starting conditions

At the end of the year 2015 the European Court of Justice invalidated the Safe Harbour Privacy Principles, so all european companies had to process their personal data in the European Union. Subsequently many new customers came to cusy. The growth weakend only when a new agreement called «Privacy Shield» was adopted in August 2016.

In 2017 we expanded our business area to the IT infrastructure for research and development. The background to this was, that one of our customers, the Fraunhofer Institute for solar energy, needed support in this area and at least we have knowledge in provisioning IT-infrastructure. Now we aquired knowledge in optimising data science workflows from gathering and exploring data to stable software suitable for production.

Later we also have worked for the Humboldt University, the Beuth University and Springer nature.

To show researchers how they can use this infrastructure, we offer seminars and also provide several tutorials:

On 16 July 2020, the European Court of Justice ruled that the Privacy Shield agreement is also inadmissible. As a result, the demand for our data protection-compliant IT infrastructure for research and development in Germany based on JupyterHub, BinderHub and GitLab grew.

So far we have shown you the external conditions, in which we operate, but our internal organisation should also be interesting.

Internal organisation

From the beginning we work with agile methods to organise ourselves. So we try working together in the most effective way to achieve our goals as we get closer to the life we want to live.

How do we do that in detail?

So we worked remotely from different locations long before Corona.

  • We have not set working hours
  • we have unlimited vacation and no hierarchy
  • We work in self-organised groups
  • Our work depends on a lot of tools like video conferencing and chat for direct communication, Kanban boards for the joint work organisation and so on.

Because transparency is one of our strongest values, we like to be as open and honest as we can with each other, our community and also our clients.

As a result we believe in financial transparency giving our revenue streams including our wins and losses to our stakeholders. Also we try to include them in what we are doing, why we are doing and where we’re going.

Our salaries are as open as well: No one works in a permanent empoyment for cusy, all are freelancers or entrepreneurs working with multiple clients. Salaries are calculated from the uniform base value and the commitment.