About Cortex
Built by people who have done the job.
CORTEX exists because the people who founded it spent their careers inside government, defence and intelligence, and knew the technology could be better.
What we believe
We believe organisations operating in sensitive environments should never have to choose between frontier AI capability and the sovereignty their work requires.
Sovereignty is the heart of our mission.
Organisations doing sensitive work must hold their own data, control their own infrastructure and keep the intelligence their work generates inside their own perimeter. AI that sends your data to someone else's systems, on someone else's terms, is not a capability. It is an exposure. We build so that the advantage AI creates belongs to the organisation that created it, permanently and provably.
We also believe something harder won. Government and regulated environments too often run on outdated technology, delivered slowly and expensively by large organisations with little feel for the mission it is meant to serve. We know because we served in those environments. We used those systems. We watched capability arrive years late and a generation behind.
CORTEX is our answer. It is possible to put current, frontier technology into the hands of government, defence and regulated organisations. It takes three things together: genuine technical excellence, a real understanding of the operating environment, and the assurances that environment rightly demands. Most suppliers have one. Some have two. We built CORTEX to hold all three.
How we work
Small, senior, accountable.
The people who design the platform are the people who deliver it. No account layers, no handovers between teams you never meet.
Sovereignty as the starting point.
Every deployment begins from the customer's control of their data, their jurisdiction and their infrastructure. Sovereignty, assurance and safety are commitments we make on every engagement, not options on a price list.
Evergreen by design.
We keep our products current with the latest technology as part of how they run, not as a project you have to fund later. The newest models and capabilities arrive continuously, so what you deploy never goes stale and there are no disruptive upgrade cycles to plan around.
Founders
Mark Stoter OBE
Chief Executive and Co-founder
Mark spent twenty years as a technologist in specialist units of the British Army, building and fielding capability across intelligence, cyber operations and government diplomacy. He commanded the Army's technical intelligence regiment, for which he was made OBE. Beyond the military he founded a privacy technology startup, holds a patent in multiparty computation, and is CISSP qualified. He started CORTEX because the people doing the nation's most sensitive work deserve technology as good as the mission demands.
Tim Holmes-Mitra MBE
Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder
As CTO, Tim leads the design and build of the CORTEX platform. After serving for ten years in technical intelligence roles in the Canadian Army, he held senior leadership roles at Canonical and in two startups. He holds a patent in multi-party computation and was appointed MBE for his innovation and technical leadership of cyber warfare techniques across NATO. His work at CORTEX carries a single standard: platforms for high-consequence environments must be engineered to a level their users can stake decisions on.
The founders are supported by a specialist team with experience across PhD-level research in machine learning, defence and wider government, spanning secure platform delivery, data pipelines and client solutions.
The mark
Our mark is an ouroboros: the ring that closes on itself.
It stands for the strange loop, the self-referential structure Douglas Hofstadter described in his book “Gödel, Escher, Bach” as the engine of intelligence: a system whose output becomes its own input, observing itself and improving. Half a century on, that idea is no longer philosophy. Machine learning is a loop. Act, observe, feed the result back, improve. The systems now reshaping the world are built on it.
On CORTEX, the loop closes inside your perimeter. The learning, the improvement and the analytical edge your organisation builds all stay with you. That is the whole proposition, drawn as a symbol.
CORTEX is the trading name of Cortex Labs Limited, registered in England and Wales, company number 16496755. Registered office: 167-169 Great Portland Street, London W1W 5PF.
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