Clarity, not consultants

The gap we set out to close

The Department of Defense buys from hundreds of thousands of private companies — and a great many of them are small: machine shops, parts suppliers, specialty manufacturers, and the IT firms that support them. After years of sensitive defense information being stolen from contractor networks, the DoD now requires every company that handles Controlled Unclassified Information to meet a fixed cybersecurity standard, NIST SP 800-171, enforced through CMMC. No certification, no contracts.

For a large defense prime with a security team, that's a project. For a 12-person machine shop, it's a wall. The owners aren't security professionals, the standard is dense, and the consultants who can guide them charge tens of thousands of dollars. The enterprise compliance platforms are built — and priced — for funded companies with IT staff. At the other end, free tools hand you a score and leave you to figure out the rest.

What we built

144 is the missing middle: guided, affordable software that does the practical work a consultant would, at a price a small shop can actually pay. It walks you through every control in plain language, scores you the way the DoD does, tells you what to fix first and what it will cost, and produces the documents an assessor expects. It turns a 110-item wall into a dated, budgeted project plan.

How we think about your data

We sell software to security-conscious people, so our own posture matters. 144 is built around a deliberate rule: we record your security posture — your answers, your plan, and pointers to where your evidence lives — but we never store your Controlled Unclassified Information itself. Your sensitive files stay in your own systems. That keeps your most sensitive data where it belongs and keeps the product lean.

What 144 is — and isn't

144 is a readiness tool. It prepares you so that when an accredited third-party assessor (a C3PAO) arrives, you pass. It is not the official certification, and it doesn't perform the technical fixes in your environment for you — it tells you precisely what they are and helps you track them done. We keep that line clear on purpose: it's honest, and it keeps the focus on getting you genuinely ready.

The name

The name 144 comes from Psalm 144:1 — a personal verse: “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle.” The mission is the same shape as the verse: equip the small contractors who do the work of the country’s defense to be ready for the fight they’re being asked to step into. That’s what this software is for.