Risks & FAQ

The honest version: what could go wrong, and what we are doing about it.

Confidential · June 2026. Forward-looking statements involve risk. Any figures shown elsewhere in this room are illustrative.

Investors reward candor over polish. Below are the risks we would raise ourselves, each paired with the mitigation already in motion. Nothing here is hidden; the same discipline that makes the Aperture engine deterministic governs how we talk about ourselves.

Product & Technical Risk

Pre-MVP on live data. The Aperture engine is built, tested, and passing its suite, but the connectors have never run against a live API. Today it is a deterministic engine proven on synthetic seed data — not a product proven in a customer's environment. Mitigation: the hard part — the deterministic measurement core with no model in the path, "pointers not payloads," and attributed cost/usage — is done. What remains is connection, not invention. We say "modeled" until a connector runs live, and "measured" only after. The next build is the first live connection.

The synthetic-demo caveat. The "$121k / 22% shadow" demonstration is the real engine running on synthetic seed data ("Meridian Software" is a PRNG seed). It is not a customer result. Mitigation: we never present it as live or as a customer outcome. It exists to prove the engine produces reproducible, audit-defensible output — which it does — not to imply revenue we have not earned.

Single-tenant today. There is no multi-tenant isolation, auth, RBAC, or audit layer yet. Mitigation: this is the named next build, sequenced deliberately. We chose to harden the deterministic core first so the security and isolation layer is built on a stable foundation rather than retrofitted.

Team Risk

Key-person and team dependency. A small senior team carries deep, specialized knowledge — the engine, the enterprise infrastructure, the standard itself. Mitigation: the named team — Richard Taubin (Founder), Joe Saba (CAIO), Chris Bennett (CTO), Roberto Lleras (CSO), and Sean Barlow (full-stack + AI) — is complementary by design across the standard, the engine, and GTM. See Team.

The SME repository is still incoming. "Completing the wheel" — a structured repository of the team's combined enterprise expertise — is not yet assembled. Mitigation: it is in progress, and the next major update identifies the full engine team behind it. We are not claiming it as present capability until it ships.

Go-to-Market & Market Risk

Channel concentration (Kelly). Kelly / MCG Kelly Services is our first channel — de-risked distribution, but a single early route to market. Mitigation: Kelly is the first channel, not the destination. The strategy is entity-first: stand up the company, then license the process, product, and brand across channels. Microsoft is the horizon, reachable through the team's senior-Microsoft relationships. Evidence stays portable, so customers are never locked in and we are never locked to one partner.

Regulatory timing. Our thesis depends on AI regulation arriving; if it stalls, demand softens. Mitigation: the trend is sourced and steep — Gartner projects 75% of world economies under AI regulation by 2030, the EU AI Act is already in force with penalties of 7% of global turnover, and EY measured board AI-risk oversight jumping from 16% to 48% of the Fortune 100 in a single year. The pressure is present-tense.

Competition from incumbents. The AI-governance platform market (Gartner: $492M → $1B+ by 2030) will attract large players. Mitigation: our durable moat is structural independence — the body that builds is never the body that attests — plus an accumulated, attributed record that compounds with time. Incumbents who both build and attest cannot replicate independence without conceding it. The annuity — continuous measurement, since an attestation is valid only against a fresh record — deepens that record every quarter.

Frequently Asked

Is this live yet? No. The engine is built and tested; it is pre-MVP on live data.

Is the $121k real? It is a real engine on synthetic data. Treat it as modeled, not measured.

What de-risks the raise? The hardest technical work is done, the channel is identified, and the market trend is independently sourced. We are funding connection and scale, not discovery.