About
Say only what can be evidenced
Cortessa's brand is its product ethos. The product refuses to assert what it cannot prove; the company holds itself to the same standard. Confidence comes from precision and proof, not from adjectives.
The problem we set out to solve
Organisations that run on controlled documents — starting with defence — carry document estates that are too large to cross-check by hand. When a value is superseded, an old figure can still sit, correct-looking, somewhere in the estate: a coupling rated to 30 bar where the current standard says 45. That is not a typo. It is rework, a finding, and safety-case risk.
The tools that could cross-check it in seconds are the ones you cannot use. Cloud assistants are barred at the boundary — data would leave, and they confidently invent specifications. Enterprise search returns passages with no provenance guarantee. Manual review is accurate, but it scales only with headcount.
The guarantee we built instead
Cortessa answers from an approved document set with every claim cited to its source — or it refuses. Each output is provenance-gated as Verified, Draft or Refused, and the gate applies a deterministic, versioned containment policy before a claim can pass as Verified; the cited source remains available for the engineer to inspect.
Safety here is not a prompt you hope the model obeys — it is enforced in code. And Cortessa never certifies: it hands the engineer cited evidence, and the engineer signs off. That is the whole mission — to make it safe to put document intelligence next to work where being confidently wrong is unacceptable.
Defence-first, by design
We start in defence because its constraints are the hardest: sovereignty, provenance and air-gap operation are non-negotiable. A product that clears that bar clears it for everyone else. Cortessa runs disconnected on a dedicated sovereign workstation on the analyst's desk — a single executable; no server, no cloud, no internet dependency.
From that launchpad the same guarantee travels to civil aerospace, nuclear, energy, rail, pharma, legal and government. One product, one guarantee, many document estates.
Founder
Cortessa was founded by Michael Davidson, an aircraft engineer by background whose career spans aerospace fuel systems and work on the F-35 programme — controlled, safety-critical document environments of exactly the kind Cortessa is built for. The detail of that work is governed and stays that way; the habits it taught do not.
The venture is founder-led and built on a single conviction, learned in that world: document intelligence belongs next to high-consequence engineering work only if it can prove every claim — or refuse. Cortessa began as a practical engineering problem, not an AI product: how do you put an answering system beside work like that without ever letting it invent the answer?
Cortessa is developed by Cortessa Ltd, a company registered in Scotland, of which Michael Davidson is founder and director.
How we communicate
- Precise. Concrete, checkable specifics over slogans.
- Restrained. Every metric carries its test context; no bare numbers, no hype.
- Credible. Written for a sceptical engineer — if a claim would draw a red pen, we cut it or cite it.
Want to see it against your documents?
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