Optimal builds and breaks AI systems for regulated environments — governed gateways, adversarial testing, and security assessments inside FedRAMP, CMMC, GovCloud, and air-gapped boundaries. Need the compliant Microsoft 365 enclave underneath it? We build and manage that too.
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Engineered and measured to the standards that gate production AI
Optimal, LLC is a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business — SBA-certified and eligible for veteran set-aside contracts. CAGE 14HQ0 · UEI TYMSGKDF2K48.
Download capability statement →“Optimal assessed the Azure sandbox where our AI agents are being built before anything went live. The report was clear and prioritized, gave us a straight answer on where the build actually stood, and our developer could act on it right away. Fast turnaround and easy to work with.”
AI-native application and supply-chain security, running. Real SBOM and vulnerability scanning, EPSS and CISA KEV enrichment, and frontier-model reachability analysis that reads your actual codebase — turning thousands of raw findings into an evidence-backed action queue and an exportable VEX record. Deployed in your environment, air-gap capable.
Optimal secures the AI the defense industrial base is putting into production — and builds the compliant place to run it. The intelligence and the sovereign cloud underneath it, from one veteran-owned partner.
Most GCC High shops stop at email and files. We stand up governed access to the frontier models authorized for your sovereign cloud — one gateway, fail-closed guardrails, a defensible audit trail — plus assessment and red-teaming of the AI you deploy.
We stand up your Microsoft 365 GCC High tenant, migrate your people and data into it, engineer the NIST 800-171 controls, and run it for you — so you stay eligible to win and keep DoD work that touches CUI or ITAR-controlled data.
This is NINELINE — your 9-line for software and AI, and the working proof behind our Governed AI Engineering. The same open-source Zero Trust design we stand up in your environment, running.
Cloudflare Access · Okta OIDC
Authenticate the caller, then check the request against a model and resource allowlist. No token is issued for a model you haven't approved.
NeMo Guardrails · PII/secret detectors
Inline detection on prompt and response — injection, jailbreak, PII/DLP, secret exfiltration — fail-closed and pre-call. A blocked request never reaches the provider.
LiteLLM keys · Squid egress
Proxy to the approved model — commercial, GovCloud, or self-hosted — through per-key virtual credentials, with egress pinned to a default-deny allowlist.
Structured JSON · Postgres
Write a structured audit row joined by request ID — the artifact your reviewers read directly, on your retention, in your account.
No wrapper, no SDK rewrite — point your existing OpenAI- or Anthropic-compatible client at the gateway and every call is governed and logged.
A working method, not a black box. You see the attack surface as we map it, the findings as we prove them, and the fixes as they close.
We define the systems in play, the data they touch, the threat model that actually matters to you, and the rules of engagement. The scope is written to your stack — not lifted from a template.
We inventory every way in and out: models, prompts, retrieval sources, tools and functions, identities, credentials, and egress paths. You can't secure what hasn't been mapped.
We run the OWASP LLM Top 10 and MITRE ATLAS techniques against your systems — injection, extraction, manipulation, abuse-case chains — and document what works, with evidence.
Ranked findings, reproduction steps, business impact, and specific remediation — written for the engineers who fix it and the leaders who own the risk.
We help close the findings, then prove they're closed. The engagement ends with evidence, not a backlog of open items.
Optimal does two things that work together. First, we build, migrate, and manage CMMC-ready Microsoft 365 GCC High enclaves for the defense industrial base — the sovereign environment you need to handle CUI and ITAR-controlled data on DoD contracts. Second, we stand up the governed AI that runs safely inside those environments, and assess and red-team the AI systems teams deploy. We're an SBA-certified Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB).
GCC High is a US-sovereign version of Microsoft 365, physically and logically isolated, with US data residency and screened US-person support. If you're a defense contractor handling Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) or ITAR/export-controlled data, GCC High is the environment built to support the DFARS 252.204-7012 and CMMC Level 2 obligations in your contracts. Optimal stands the enclave up and runs it for you.
No environment makes you compliant on its own — CMMC Level 2 is a third-party assessment against the 110 NIST SP 800-171 controls. What GCC High gives you is a foundation built for those controls. Optimal implements and documents the control set inside your enclave (SSP and POA&M), collects the evidence, and gets you assessment-ready. The certified assessment itself is performed independently by an accredited C3PAO — we prepare the environment, we don't grade it.
Both. We're advisory-led — scoped engagements and managed operations — and we make NINELINE, our AI-native application and supply-chain security platform, deployed inside your own environment rather than sold as multi-tenant SaaS. The control patterns we implement are published as open-source reference architecture, so you can read exactly what we build before we build it.
NINELINE is Optimal's AI-native application and supply-chain security platform: real SBOM and vulnerability scanning, EPSS and CISA KEV enrichment, and frontier-model reachability analysis that reads your actual codebase — turning thousands of raw findings into an evidence-backed action queue and an exportable VEX record. In the reference scan it compressed 874 raw findings to the 18 that required action. It deploys in your environment, air-gap capable, with a live demonstrator at 9line.gooptimal.io.
Yes, and it's often the fastest path. We build governed, audited access to the frontier models already available in the cloud you license — Azure OpenAI Service, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Vertex AI — so your teams reach them safely without a new vendor or procurement. It's available to enterprises and to all of SLED (state, local, and education), as well as federal teams.
Yes. Optimal is an SBA-certified Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB), eligible for SDVOSB and VOSB set-aside contracts, and works with federal agencies, SLED (state, local, and education) entities, and enterprises. We deliver across GovCloud, commercial cloud (Azure, AWS, GCP), on-prem, and fully air-gapped networks.
Founder & CEO. Former C3PAO lead assessor — TS/SCI, CISSP, CCSP, CCP — and a U.S. Air Force Security Forces veteran, now building and breaking agentic systems for regulated environments. Scoping calls are run by Ryan, not a sales team.
Tell us the contracts you’re chasing and where you are today. We’ll scope the engagement — an AI assessment or red team, governed AI engineering, or the managed GCC High enclave underneath it. Calls are run by the founder.
Book a scoping call →