Consus launched this week with a single API endpoint that lets defense contractors use commercial AI models without tripping ITAR or CUI rules.
The YC-backed startup sits between a company's AI requests and whatever infrastructure is allowed to touch sensitive, export-controlled data. Every model request must carry a compliance suffix specifying the exact security tier - FedRAMP High or ITAR - and bare model names get rejected outright. Consus says it has completed a FedRAMP High equivalency audit covering all 410 controls, the government's toughest bar for unclassified-but-sensitive systems. The company stores no prompts or completions at rest; it keeps only billing and audit metadata, and customers must go through a verification and contracting process before getting API keys - there is no self-serve signup.
Aerospace and defense firms have largely sat out the AI boom because frontier models are scattered unevenly across AWS GovCloud, Azure Government, and Google's government cloud, and few companies can afford to stand up and secure more than one. By normalizing access behind one endpoint, Consus is betting that compliance plumbing, not model quality, is the real bottleneck keeping regulated industries off AI tools everyone else already uses.
It is a narrow niche - $40 a seat plus token costs, sold only to vetted organizations - but it is the kind of unglamorous infrastructure play that tends to matter more than another chatbot wrapper.