Blacksky
Blacksky Services
Blacksky's work, in order of what it leads with.
1. Prism: making big data understandable
The heart of Blacksky, and its biggest product with AgentOS. With Prism, a large, scattered body of information becomes organized, searchable and explorable. See Prism.
- Getting it in. Collecting material from official sources, archives, feeds and an organization's own systems, on a schedule, with every record keeping its source.
- Making sense of it. Cleaning, enriching and structuring it: tagging, linking related records, summarizing, and indexing by meaning so the right passage turns up even when the question uses different words.
- Showing it. Web experiences people can explore: profiles, timelines, maps, comparisons, balanced news, data labs.
- Sharing it. Clean, well-sourced data offered as datasets or an API.
Proof: KnowGov (11.9M+ documents of government data, free and nonpartisan), Rap Almanac for Rap Research Labs, The World Bank's open data platform, and USAID's environmental database modernization.
2. AgentOS: agents that connect people to the data
Once data is understandable, people can talk to it. AgentOS, Blacksky's other biggest product, is the platform its agents run on: they answer from the data and show their sources. See AgentOS.
- On the phone (Dewey). An agent answers a phone line, lets callers interrupt, switches languages and hands off to a person with a summary.
- On the web. A chat with room for more: the documents behind each answer, cards for related work, suggested next questions, and a recap the visitor can keep.
- For the people who run it. Dashboards for conversations, follow ups waiting for approval, what people asked about, what the data could not answer, and what it all costs.
Proof: Maurice, Blacksky's own agent on the phone and the web; Shirley, the civic agent answering from KnowGov's data.
3. The rest of the platform
Around Prism and AgentOS, offered as parts of an engagement:
- Dewey: an AgentOS agent on a phone line.
- GoodBrains: the model foundation, a choice of language models through one API.
- Black Cloud: dedicated, itemized hosting for each client.
4. Engineering and modernization
The track record behind everything above: 18+ years of platform delivery for federal agencies and enterprises, through prime contractors or directly.
- Platform migrations and modernization (15+ migrations led, sites serving 50M+ users)
- Full-stack development: Python, FastAPI, Next.js, React, TypeScript
- Data engineering: pipelines, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, vector databases
- Drupal enterprise work when it is the right tool
Agencies: Treasury, DOT, NIH, FDA, OSHA, SEC, USDA FSIS, HHS, USAID, the Department of Education, and The World Bank. Enterprises: Vanguard, Mastercard, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Hearst and Billboard.
Federal capabilities
- FISMA compliance and federal security protocols
- API authentication, key management and audit trails
- Work through prime contractors, or as a subcontractor
Also at Blacksky
- Education. Blacksky Up, a free apprenticeship program across media, technology, business and arts, and free courses: LLM 101 and NLM 101.
- Research. NLM (No Language Model), on emergent intelligence from populations of simple agents, published openly.
- Invention and hardware. The BSM provisional patent for biomimetic civic infrastructure, Veil (privacy-preserving computer vision, patent pending) and SlimeHive (swarm robotics).
- Creative AI. Symphony, an AI image studio, and Hip-Hop Voice AI, a conversational cultural archive.
Technology
- Data: PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Qdrant, ChromaDB, embeddings and semantic search
- Models: open models such as Llama through GoodBrains and hosted providers, local inference with Ollama and llama.cpp, on-device models
- Backend and web: Python, FastAPI, Next.js, React, TypeScript
- Voice: real-time speech in and out, telephony, interruption
- Infrastructure: Docker, Railway, Azure, AWS, GCP
- Hardware: Raspberry Pi, ESP32, BLE, LoRa