The first city to switch everything on. We do the same for companies.
On the evening of 12 November 1884, Timișoara lit all of its streets with 731 electric lamps — the first city in continental Europe to electrify everything at once, a quarter-century before Budapest. Lumeni 884 embeds senior engineers inside your company to make the same kind of jump: from paper, spreadsheets and aging systems straight to AI-native software, in weeks.
731 lamps · 59 km of cable · one evening
In 1857, gas lighting arrived in Timișoara and two hundred lamps went up along its streets. Twenty-five years later, the Viennese company supplying the gas demanded steeper terms to renew the contract. The city council said no. Instead of renewing, it decided to skip a technology altogether.
In 1882 the city signed with the Anglo-Austrian Brush Electrical Company. Two years of cable-laying later, on the evening of 12 November 1884, a steam plant in the Fabric district pushed current through 59 kilometres of new cable, and 731 carbon-filament lamps came on across every street at once — making Timișoara the first city in continental Europe to light all of its streets with electricity.
“A whitish-yellow light instantly flooded the streets of the city on the Bega, and coloured the elegantly decorated buildings.”
Vienna and Budapest — the imperial capitals, many times richer — kept their gas. Budapest switched on its first permanent electric street lamps in 1909, a quarter of a century later. Being smaller, and less invested in the old way, turned out to be the advantage.
02The argument
Timișoara could leap because it had little invested in gas. The same mechanism works today. In 2000, about three percent of Africa had a fixed phone line — so the continent skipped copper and went straight to mobile. Kenya's M-Pesa ran on basic handsets, and formal financial inclusion rose from 27% in 2006 to 85% in 2024. In Senegal, Wave built mobile money in Wolof and French and became Francophone Africa's first billion-dollar company. None of them modernised the old system. They skipped it.
A company running on paper, spreadsheets and a fifteen-year-old ERP is in the same position. There is no legacy to protect and no migration to fund — and AI has collapsed the cost of building custom production software. The ladder that used to take five to ten years — digitise, buy an ERP, integrate it, then maybe analytics — can now be skipped in favour of building the current generation directly.
Two honest caveats. The leap skips the ladder, not the work: your data still has to be reachable, processes still change, and people still need to adopt what is built. And it does not happen at arm's length — 95% of enterprise AI pilots show no measurable result, and they fail at deployment, not at the model. That is why we don't run pilots from our office. We come to yours.
For the first time, being behind on technology is an advantage — if you skip deliberately.
03Forward-deployed engineering
A forward-deployed engineer works inside your company — at your site, on your systems, next to your people — and is measured on one thing: software running in production and being used. Every engagement ends with your team holding the source code, the runbook, and a trained owner. We are designed to leave.
One to two weeks on site. We map how work actually flows — the paper, the spreadsheets, the workarounds — and identify which modernisation stages you can skip. You get a build order with cost and risk for each system. Not a strategy deck.
One or two senior engineers at your site for eight to twelve weeks, shipping one complete production system end to end. Fixed scope, fixed price. You keep the running system, its source code, a runbook, and a person on your team trained to own it.
One workflow, replaced outright: document and invoice extraction, approval routing, plain-language reporting over your operational data, customer intake in five languages. It integrates with what you already run — explicitly not a big-bang migration.
You have a stalled AI pilot or a vendor proof-of-concept. We make it real: data plumbing, evaluation, workflow integration, access control, and adoption by the people who actually do the job.
04The method
The first week is spent doing the job beside your staff. The workflow in people's heads is never the workflow in the manual — we build from the real one.
We build in place, on your systems and your data. The first working software reaches production in weeks, integrated with what you already have.
The system goes live with the people who will use it. Adoption is part of the engagement, not an afterthought — we are measured on usage, not on delivery.
Before we leave, someone on your team can run, fix and extend the system. You keep the source code, the runbook, and the owner. Then we leave.
Correspondence
Headquartered in Timișoara, working across Europe and West Africa. Tell us what your company runs on today — paper, Excel, an aging ERP, all three. We will tell you honestly whether a leap is available, and what it would cost.
We answer in Romanian, German, English, French and Wolof.
Timișoara, Romania