THE MISSION

OUR STORY

The age of autonomous machines is creating a new technology problem. Artificial intelligence is moving out of the cloud and into machines that sense, decide, and act in the physical world, but the infrastructure needed to make those systems secure, interoperable, and trustworthy has not kept pace. Caliburn is building that foundation: a common technology layer designed to make physical AI secure by default, interoperable at scale, and ready to operate where failure matters.

Caliburn was founded on the conviction that the cyberphysical age cannot be built the way the last one was. Security and interoperability cannot be bolted on after the fact; they have to be designed in from the start. From that conviction comes our mission: to give the United States and its allies an interoperable and secure foundation for the age of autonomous machines.

Our conviction came from the deckplates. Caliburn's founder, Zac Staples, spent over two decades as a naval officer watching our nation struggle to deploy national security systems that are innovative, interoperable, and cyber resilient. A renewed focus on acquisition reform is important, but experienced defense engineers know that deeper challenges in the underlying technology baseline continue to shape the pace of innovation we can achieve, the interoperability we can guarantee, and the security we need.

The old way of building defense systems forces a choice between moving fast and staying secure, when the age of autonomous machines demands agility and security. Inside Caliburn’s parent company, Fathom5, a research effort was launched to build a new substrate for AI and autonomous applications. This project sought to fix the decades of patches and half-measures plaguing cybersecurity while developing the platform services needed to make interoperability for defense technologies work as simply as connecting iOS devices to one another or adding an app to a smartphone.

When the technology reached TRL 9, Fathom5 spun the research effort into Caliburn Technologies, which emerged from stealth in January 2026. Caliburn’s flagship product, TempestOS, provides the foundation for interoperability and security across autonomous systems, while Mission Bay brings together the hardware payloads and mission software designed to “just work” within the TempestOS ecosystem.

The age of autonomous machines is here. The systems with the greatest consequence, the ones that move, decide, and act on their own, are being built around us, and the choices we make now will determine whether they can be trusted when it counts. Caliburn exists to build that foundation: secure from the start, capable of delivering at the speed the mission demands, and answerable to the United States and its allies who will depend on it.