Tampa-based software company Certus Core has raised $1.6 million in a seed funding round and has been awarded a contract for work with the U.S. Air Force’s innovation arm on a generative artificial intelligence data project.
The startup will work with AFWERX, the innovation arm, on applying its Semantic Knowledge Graph through a federal Small Business and Innovation Research phase one contract. The phase one contract signifies an initial proof of concept and merit for the software.
It’s not the company’s first SBIR contract, but the $1.6 million raise — from three angel investors — is a formal step toward actively looking for a Series A funding round, Certus Core’s CEO Jake Dyal told Tampa Bay Inno.
Certus Core, an Embarc Collective company, was founded in 2021. It’s a veteran-founded business that contracts with companies on data problems and projects. Its core product, the Semantic Knowledge Graph, is a data engineering platform that uses natural language processing. It enables machine learning and AI “for autonomous systems, financial intelligence, logistics and other data challenges,” according to a release.
It will be implementing that technology on a specific Air Force problem. It’s likely to continue into a phase two contract, Dyal said. The other perk of the SBIR contract is that it opens up other contracting opportunities.
“Now that we have that, it means any Air Force customer can actually have a contract with us,” Dyal said.
Besides focusing on the contract, the company will work to grow the business in the coming year. It currently has nine employees and brought in $1.4 million in revenue in 2023, Dyal said.
Tampa companies Rise8 and Tesseract Ventures also work with AFWERX on SBIR contracts.
