Company
Built by people who have
been downstream of a bad command.
Kirra Systems builds the fail-closed layer between AI intent and physical action. It is grounded in a simple conviction, earned across enterprise hardware verification, federal network security, military communications, and the operation of real public-safety infrastructure: complex systems must fail closed, in the real world, with real consequences downstream.
The founder
Justin Looney
Founder
Titusville, Florida
Justin Looney founded Kirra Systems and architected its core — the planner-independent checker, the fail-closed actuation model, and the cryptographic attestation that makes every safety decision auditable. His career has centered on the exact disciplines a safety governor demands: rigorous hardware and systems verification, network security, and safety-critical infrastructure.
Enterprise hardware verification
Hardware and Diagnostics Test Engineer and technical lead on IBM's xSeries enterprise server line; test lead at Emulex for CNA/FCoE — Converged Network Adapter / Fibre Channel over Ethernet, high-performance data-center networking hardware. This is work defined by one discipline: proving complex systems behave correctly and fail predictably under fault — the discipline at the heart of Kirra.
Federal network & security programs
U.S. EPA Technical Point of Contact (GS-2210-13) on an enterprise network and security task order — technical authority over enterprise wireless design and deployment, a data-center network modernization from Cisco Catalyst to Nexus, and a WAN security upgrade to MTIPS, the federal Managed Trusted Internet Protocol Service.
Career military communications
Retired U.S. Army Signal Corps Master Sergeant (E-8), a Telecommunications Operations Chief (25W) — two decades leading mission-critical military communications, where systems fail safely or not at all.
Real safety-critical control
Licensed operation of public water-treatment infrastructure — direct, hands-on responsibility for the automated control systems that govern a real public utility, where a wrong command has physical consequences and auditability is not optional.
Experience, in the codebase
Where that background shows up
The founder's story isn't a résumé beside the product — it's visible in the engineering choices. Each discipline maps to a mechanism you can read.
Verification instinct → proofs, not promises
A career spent proving hardware fails predictably is why the checker core is machine-checked over all inputs, kill-tested for durability, and gated by 27 CI lanes — not asserted in a datasheet.
Network security → attestation & audit
Federal network-security program leadership is why trust is proven per node with Ed25519 challenge-response, and why every decision lands in a hash-chained ledger — a governor you audit, not one you trust.
crates/kirra-safety-authority/src/attestation.rssrc/audit_chain.rs
Military comms → fail safe or not at all
Two decades where systems fail safely or not at all is the origin of the fail-closed default: unproven, stale, malformed, or unclassified — the answer is deny.
Water-plant control → deny on physics
Hands-on responsibility for utility control systems is why Kirra's industrial adapters decode the actual setpoint on the wire and deny on magnitude regardless of credentials — the exact class of the 2021 Oldsmar water-plant incident.
The founder biography above is provided by Kirra Systems; the repository links show the mechanisms each discipline informed.
Where we are
Titusville, Florida
On Florida's Space Coast — a region built around systems that cannot be allowed to fail unsafely. Kirra Systems develops entirely in the open; the fastest way to know the company is to read its repository.