On a Tampa morning in January 2024, a small team at Certus Core got the kind of email that justifies a year of unpaid work: AFWERX had picked them for an SBIR Phase I to point a semantic knowledge graph at the Department of the Air Force's data problem [EIN Presswire, January 2024]. Eighteen months later, the same shop landed alongside SkyTL on a $900,000 NASA contract to build AI-powered wildfire prediction [Tampa Bay Business Journal, August 2025]. Two very different missions, one underlying claim: that the bottleneck in defense and disaster response is no longer collecting data, it is reconciling it.
That is the bet behind IBIS, the company's flagship product. IBIS is pitched as user-driven edge software for decentralized sensor and robotics data integration, queried in natural language [Crunchbase]. Underneath sits a semantic knowledge graph, the company's argument for why context-aware decisions need a structure richer than a relational database and more disciplined than a vector store [Certus Core Website]. The pitch to a SOCOM analyst or an Air Force planner is straightforward: stop writing SQL against fourteen incompatible feeds, ask the question in English, get an answer with provenance attached.
The wedge is procurement, and Certus Core has done the unglamorous work. Through Carahsoft, the company is listed across eight contract vehicles including GSA MAS, ITES-SW2, and Tradewinds Awardable, with USSOCOM and USAF named among its customers [Carahsoft]. For a seed-stage company, that contracting surface area matters more than any product demo. It is the difference between a twelve-month sales cycle and a ninety-day one, and it is the reason regional defense-tech investors are paying attention.
Why the bet could be big
The broader environment is unusually friendly to a company with this shape. The Pentagon is buying software faster, AFWERX and SBIR pipelines are funneling early dollars to small primes, and the Replicator initiative has put autonomous systems and the data they generate at the top of acquisition wishlists. A platform that promises to fuse sensor outputs across drones, maritime systems, and command centers is selling into a defined and growing line item. The company's own blog frames the customer pain crisply: nearly 67% of organizations struggle to integrate new sensor data with existing information sources [Certus Core Blog]. Treat the figure as a marketing statistic, but the underlying observation matches what program offices have been saying out loud for years.
The capital stack is regional but coherent. Capital Q Ventures and Tampa Bay Ventures co-led the seed round, with the Business Journal pegging total disclosed funding at roughly $1.62 million [Tampa Bay Business Journal, February 2025] [Tracxn]. Florida has been quietly assembling a defense-tech cluster around MacDill Air Force Base and U.S. Special Operations Command, and Certus Core sits geographically inside its best customer's commute.
A back of envelope
Here is the unit-economics question that matters. A SBIR Phase I is typically worth around $150,000 and a Phase II can run to roughly $1.7 million (estimated, based on Air Force SBIR norms). The NASA-SkyTL award is $900,000 split with a partner. If Certus Core converts its current Air Force Phase I into a Phase II and lands two more Phase I contracts in the next year, that is on the order of $2 million of non-dilutive contract revenue against a $1.62 million seed. Layer in even a single seven-figure production contract through GSA MAS at, say, $1.2 million ARR, and the company is approaching default-alive on government revenue alone. Burn matters here: a fifteen-person team at fully loaded Tampa cost of roughly $200,000 per head is $3 million a year, so the math only closes if contract velocity keeps compounding. The seed round buys roughly six to nine months of runway at that headcount (estimated), which means the next twelve months are about converting pilots into vehicles with recurring ceilings.
| Milestone | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Seed funding (total disclosed) | $1.62M | Tracxn |
| AFWERX SBIR Phase I | Awarded Jan 2024 | EIN Presswire |
| NASA wildfire contract (with SkyTL) | $900K | TBBJ, Aug 2025 |
| Federal contract vehicles | 8 | Carahsoft |
The honest counterfactual
What bears will say is that the semantic knowledge graph category is crowded with well-funded incumbents and that natural-language interfaces over enterprise data are now table stakes for every foundation-model vendor courting the Pentagon. Palantir's Foundry and AIP, in particular, occupy exactly the conceptual real estate Certus Core is staking out, with a decade head start and program-of-record relationships [Carahsoft]. What bulls answer is that Certus Core is not trying to displace Palantir at the enterprise tier, it is selling edge-deployed software priced for the unit, the squadron, the small program office that cannot afford a Foundry implementation and needs an answer this fiscal quarter. The eight contract vehicles already in place suggest the company has built the procurement plumbing to actually take that order.
What to watch
The next twelve months should tell us whether IBIS becomes a product or remains a contract vehicle. Watch for an SBIR Phase II conversion out of the AFWERX work, a follow-on from USSOCOM that names IBIS specifically rather than a research scope, and any Series A signal from a coastal defense-tech investor (Shield Capital, Razor's Edge, Decisive Point) that would validate the thesis beyond Florida. A second NASA or DHS award would also confirm that the wildfire deployment is a repeatable pattern rather than a one-off partnership with SkyTL.
The incumbent Certus Core has to beat is Palantir. Not at the enterprise tier, where that fight is unwinnable today, but at the edge: the squadron-sized deployment, the maritime unmanned system, the regional emergency operations center where Foundry is overkill and a spreadsheet is underkill. If IBIS becomes the answer to "what does the operator actually run on the laptop in the truck," the seed round will look like the cheapest entry ticket of the 2024 vintage.