Happy 10th Birthday to The Vertex Project!
by: visi | 2026-05-05
A few years ago, I wrote a blog post celebrating our 8th anniversary and I said 10 would be here in the blink of an eye – and wow – turns out that wasn’t just hyperbole.
So here we are. A decade into a “crazy idea” that, if I’m being honest, still sounds a little crazy when you say it out loud:
Build a nation-state caliber intelligence analysis platform for the private sector, let analysts fuse their most sensitive internal data with the chaos of the outside world, and make it actually usable.
No buzzwords required.
You could read my 8th anniversary post to get the back story, but I put it on substack and our marketing manager would scold me if I didn’t put some SEO optimized content here, so here it goes!
The Idea Wasn’t the Hard Part
Back in 2016, when we started this thing, we weren’t short on ideas. We were short on patience for how things were being done.
We had already built one version of a “central intelligence system” before. We knew what worked, what didn’t, and more importantly, what we wished we had done differently.
So naturally, we did what any reasonable engineers would do:
We built it again. And then rebuilt it again. And then threw parts of it away and did it properly.
Our early years spent working on the DARPA Enhanced Attribution program gave us the luxury (and the curse) of iterating toward what we actually wanted to exist. Not what a market analyst report said should exist. Not what a slide deck could sell (no offense to our sales director 😉).
We wanted to build the tools that the analysts actually needed.
That distinction has been our mantra ever since.
The Moment It Became Real
At some point, you have to stop building in the lab and see if the idea survives in the wild.
For us, that meant walking away from the comfort of government contracts and betting that there were people out there who needed this badly enough to become early adopters.
That’s a fun and terrifying moment, by the way. Highly recommend. No notes.
We had Synapse in a form we believed in, a small runway, and a couple of early believers.
And then we did the only thing that really matters:
We shipped.
There were a few interested customers. Then a few more. And 10 years later, users and analysts moved around and spread the word around about Vertex and Synapse to their new gigs. In 10 years, we grew into a community and I couldn’t be more grateful.
10 Years In: What Actually Matters
A decade later, a few things have held up surprisingly well:
1. The “central intelligence system” idea wasn’t wrong - but it was early.
Turns out, if you give analysts a way to model reality instead of just collecting artifacts, they tend to do better work.
Shocking, I know.
2. Word of mouth > everything else.
You know me - we’ve never been interested in playing the buzzword game. The people doing the work know what works. If you solve real problems, they’ll tell each other.
If you don’t…they’ll also tell each other.
3. Being independent is a feature, not a constraint.
Not being beholden to investors or chasing artificial growth targets has allowed us to optimize for one thing:
Impact.
That sounds nice in a blog post, but in practice it means we get to make decisions like analysts and engineers rather than chasing the hype cycles.
4. This is still a hard problem.
If anything, the problem space has gotten more complex. More data, more noise, more pressure to move faster with less context.
Which is exactly why the original idea still matters.
What Didn’t Change (and Probably Won’t)
We’re still a relatively small team (but we recently reached 15 folks!)
We still have long sales cycles (that’s showbiz).
We still spend quite a bit of time explaining why we’re not “just another TIP.”
And we still occasionally get asked some version of: “Wait, what do you guys actually do?”
Which is totally fair. The real answer is still something like:
We build systems that help people understand complex, adversarial environments using all the data they have, not just the data that’s easy to ingest.
That’s never been an easy thing to explain in one sentence.
The Part That Actually Matters
Tools are tools.
The real story, and the part I care about most, is the people using them and the impact they’re having on the world.
Over the last 10 years, we’ve had the chance to work with some of the best analysts in the world - people solving problems that don’t have clean answers, in environments that don’t tolerate mistakes.
If we’ve done anything right, it’s building something that respects that work.
Not simplifies it into dashboards.
Not abstracts it into nonsense.
Actively supports it.
Looking Ahead (a.k.a. Still Just Getting Started)
If the first 10 years were about proving the idea works, the next 10 are about scaling the impact without breaking the philosophy.
So we’ll keep doing what we’ve been doing:
Building. Refining. Ignoring the noise. And most importantly, listening to analysts.
And occasionally writing blog posts like this when another milestone sneaks up on us. 😉
Thank You
To the customers who took a chance on something that didn’t fit neatly into a Gartner quadrant.
To the analysts who pushed the platform (and us) harder than we thought possible.
To the team that continues to care more about getting it right than getting it out fast.
10 years in, and it still feels like we’re just getting started.
Which, honestly, is exactly how it should feel.
-visi
