Hey there,
I'm writing this from a plane on Wednesday morning, somewhere over the Baltic. Tomorrow evening I deliver the pitch that formally closes our seven-month accelerator programme. On the same day, our Risk Investigation Agent goes live as a purchasable product, and the graph backend behind it enters beta with a select group of users.
Seven months of behind-the-scenes work about to crack open to the outside world.
For years now I've paid attention to how celestial rhythms line up with the patterns of my own life. Not as prediction, more as a way of reading where I am within a larger current. This past week, listening to a detailed breakdown of the astrological events surrounding this period, something clicked into sharper focus. Dots I'd already been sensing connected into a picture worth sharing, because it maps so closely onto what we've been living through at Askara.
The Blood Moon Broke
On March 3rd, a total lunar eclipse passed over the Pacific and the Americas. A Blood Moon, the last one the world will see until New Year's Eve 2028. Almost three years from now.
February and March brought the most difficult conversations we've had as a team. The kind that surface when people have worked closely enough and long enough to stop being polite about what isn't working. Tuckman calls it storming. We wrote about it before, during the retreat in Tallinn when we first saw each other's shadows. But this round was different because it happened within the existing structure. We kept our time slots. We held our meetings. Nobody escalated beyond what the rhythm could hold. The storms moved through the system rather than blowing it apart, and honestly that's the more impressive version of the story. It means the container works.
The accelerator programme had been functioning as exactly that kind of container since October. Funding that freed us from client pressure. A deadline that demanded we build something real. A small team pushing toward a shared goal under genuine constraints. The whole programme was a contraction, seven months of turning inward, building beneath the surface, working through friction that high-trust teams simply have to work through if they want to get to the other side.
The Blood Moon closed that chapter. Not because I decided it did, but because something shifted in the weeks after. Conversations became calmer. Alignment got clearer. What had been turbulent started settling into something you could actually stand on.
Astronomers describe the stretch between now and late 2028 as a period without total lunar eclipses, characterised by what some call solar cycle energy, expansive rather than contractive. Whether or not you take that literally, the felt sense matches. We are moving out of necessary inward pressure and into something that wants to open.
The Hallway We Built
Tomorrow evening, the Risk Investigation Agent becomes something people can actually buy. And the graph database solution behind it, the one that maps logical relationships between risks, controls, and management decisions, enters beta with a carefully chosen group.
I want to be specific about what this means technically, because the architecture is what makes it real. The Risk Investigation Agent takes a company's context, their sector, size, regulatory obligations, existing controls, and reasons through their risk landscape the way an experienced consultant would. Not pushing them through a generic checklist but understanding what actually matters for their specific situation. It can do in days what traditionally takes months, and it does it at a price point that makes sense for the SMEs who need it most under NIS2.
The graph backend is something else entirely. It checks whether a management system's internal logic actually holds together. When a company says a particular control mitigates a specific risk, the graph can trace that reasoning and verify whether it makes sense given everything else in the system. We first glimpsed this possibility during an ISO27001 audit last autumn, when our auditor walked us through a wheel metaphor with risk at the hub, and that idea collided with the knowledge graph work we'd already been doing. What started as a conceptual insight has become working software.
Launching both on the same day wasn't planned that way from the start, but it makes sense now. The agent is immediate, accessible, demonstrates value within minutes. The graph is the deeper architecture that makes the whole system coherent over time. Together they represent something we couldn't have forced into existence by sitting in a room and brainstorming. They grew out of the kind of patient, sometimes uncomfortable foundational work that the accelerator made space for.
April 15th, the day I boarded this plane, carries its own weight historically. A date people associate with endings and sharp turns. But what we're stepping into on the 16th feels nothing like that. It feels like walking through a door we've been building the hallway toward for seven months.
Doubled Light
May brings something rare. Two full moons in a single month, the second of which is called a Blue Moon. It happens roughly every two and a half years. And this time it falls in a month that matters enormously for us, though not for the reasons you might expect.
I'll be travelling for most of May. China, among other places. I expect it to be confronting in the best sense, sustained exposure to a part of the world that operates on completely different assumptions about technology, governance, and collective effort. The kind of culture shock that stays with you.
Which means the team will need to run without me for an extended stretch. Properly, for the first time.
I should be honest here. We are not yet the kind of team that operates seamlessly without any single person at the centre. That's the aspiration, not the current reality. May will be the experiment that shows us how far we've come and where the gaps still live. Simon and I had some of the most honest conversations we've had in recent months about what this requires, conversations that were themselves part of the storming I mentioned earlier. What came out of those exchanges was a clarity about what needs to be true before I leave.
We're using a team weekend as a hackathon specifically focused on this. Async communication, ownership structures, making sure every person understands their own mission clearly enough to take extreme ownership of it. Not waiting for direction from me but operating from a deep enough understanding of the whole to make the right calls on their own.
The accelerator closes officially in May too. So you get this overlap where a contraction is completing and an expansion is beginning at the same time. The beta programme runs through Q3, building toward something much bigger.
I keep thinking about something I wrote early on, about how you can't force the Source. That the organic trigger for momentum has its own schedule. Stepping away for a month is the most radical version of that principle I've tested yet. Either the conditions we've built hold, or they don't. And I won't know which until I actually let go.
The Blue Moon feels right for that. Doubled light in a month of deliberate absence. Not because I'm confident it will all work perfectly, but because the only way to find out is to run the experiment.
Eclipse Over Europe
On August 12th, a total solar eclipse will cross over Iceland, northern Spain, and Portugal. The first total solar eclipse for mainland Europe since 1999. Almost three decades.
That timing lines up with something specific for us. The graph beta programme runs through Q3, and the goal is to move into alpha by Q4, which means European-wide availability. While a once-in-a-generation solar eclipse moves across the continent, we'll be in the final stages of proving whether our technology is ready to serve it.
The eclipse feels like a marker on that timeline. When we started playing the European game through Connect4Cyber, through the subsidy ecosystem, through founding in Estonia, it was still somewhat abstract. An identity we were growing into. By August, if the beta delivers what we think it can, that identity starts becoming operational.
There's a pleasing symmetry in the celestial calendar here. March's Blood Moon closed the internal contraction. May's Blue Moon tests whether the team can stand on its own. And August's solar eclipse, visible across the continent we're building for, arrives right as we prepare to open up to it properly.
I don't want to overstate this. These are markers, not prophecies. But I've learned to pay attention when the external rhythm and the internal one start moving in step. It usually means you're tapped into something real.
What Remains
The accelerator gave us seven months of protected space. In that time we worked through the hardest internal conversations within the structures we'd built, and came out the other side with two products worth launching.
Tomorrow we step through the door. In a few weeks I step away and find out what this team is actually made of. And in August, Europe gets its first total solar eclipse in nearly thirty years, right as we prepare to show up across it.
Between now and late 2028, no more Blood Moons. Just solar energy. Expansion. Outward movement.
I don't know what all of that will look like yet. But I'm learning that not knowing might actually be the point.
With care, Ben