Hey there,
There is a particular quality to the weeks just before something becomes real. Not the frantic energy of a deadline, and not yet the satisfaction of having crossed a threshold. Something quieter than both: a kind of gathered readiness, where work you have been doing in separate rooms begins to find its way into the same corridor.
That is where we are right now.
Full Circle in Tallinn
Earlier this year I wrote about the revival of building in public, describing two parallel tracks running simultaneously: development and conversation. The idea was that every feature should also be a test, does anyone actually want this? The risk calculator was the first thing we could point to, something tangible enough to start the conversation. At the time, I described it as a conversation starter rather than a finished thing, and that was honest.
What has changed since then is that the conversation and the development have converged into the same moment. On the 16th of April, at the Tallinn cyber meetup where some of our most useful connections have formed over the past year, the Risk Investigation Agent launches as a product you can buy.
It is worth sitting with that for a moment, because the distance between where this started and where it has arrived is not small. The insight that shaped everything, the one that came pouring out in a Tallinn hostel in the early hours before the accelerator began, was that risk is the hub from which everything else in a management system radiates. Months later, during the ISO audit that autumn, our auditor gave it its simplest formulation: everything refers back to and from risk. What we have spent the time since building is a system that does not just document that logic but reasons through it, tracing the path from a threat to a treatment to a control and asking whether it actually holds. The Risk Investigation Agent is that system, ready for production, and ready to learn from the organisations that start using it.
What Prototyping in the Real World Does
Our pilot client is Qwello, a company building EV charging infrastructure across Europe. They have been patient partners in the development of something neither of us had a perfect blueprint for, and the months of prototyping together have shaped the product in ways that desk research never could have.
We did not build just one agent with them. We built four. Alongside the Risk Investigation Agent, we developed an Incident Response Agent, a Contract Management Agent, and a Business Continuity Agent, each tested against real operational situations within Qwello's organisation rather than hypothetical ones. The difference that makes is significant: you learn entirely different things when the scenarios are not invented.
The character of our conversations with Qwello has shifted noticeably over this period. Earlier sessions were about whether the system could do what we claimed. More recent ones have been about what to do with what it produces. We are now preparing to demonstrate the full agent suite to the managing directors of their European branches, an audience that will decide whether these solutions roll out across their operations continent-wide. The fact that we are being invited into that room, rather than knocking on the door, tells you something about where the product actually sits.
The Ground Beneath It
There is a version of this story that focuses only on the product, and it would be incomplete. What makes this fortnight feel like a genuine convergence rather than simply a busy stretch is that the financial foundations are being laid at exactly the same moment.
The Dutch innovation grant was submitted some weeks ago, and the outcome arrives around mid-May. The Estonian Cybersecurity Innovation Fund submission is also planned on the 10th of April, as part of our current project cycle. Together, if they land as we expect, they extend the runway beyond the accelerator funding and give us the conditions to keep building on our own terms.
When I wrote about playing the European game, I tried to describe what it actually feels like to operate through subsidies and grants rather than venture capital: slower in some ways, more patient, but ultimately more aligned with the kind of company we want to be. That philosophy is not abstract right now. It is the specific financial architecture that sits underneath everything else, and the final pieces of it are falling into place in the same two weeks the product goes live. Money as a following energy, as I have written before. The trust and the work come first, and the financial feasibility follows.
What the Next Two Weeks Hold
The Estonian grant submission and the Qwello demo to the European MDs fall on the 10th. And on the 16th, back in Tallinn, the Risk Investigation Agent becomes something anyone can purchase.
None of this was engineered to land in the same fortnight. The grant deadlines, the demo timing, the meetup date, each followed its own separate logic and arrived here together anyway. Which is, in our experience, usually a signal worth paying attention to.
We are not making grand announcements just yet. What we are doing is keeping this journal honest about where things stand, so that when the threshold is crossed, you will have seen it coming.
If the problem we are solving resonates, keep an eye on this newsletter and our LinkedIn. In two weeks, the door opens.
With care, Ben