Joe Blankenship is Co-Founder and Chief Data Officer at Certus Core, a veteran-founded AI and data intelligence company based in Tampa, Florida, serving U.S. defense and national security sectors.

Joe brings a multidisciplinary background spanning electronic engineering, geospatial data science, and financial economics, with prior roles at Lockheed Martin, Blackbird Technologies, Altamira Technologies, and as a Data Scientist supporting the U.S. Air Force.

Joe holds a Doctor of Education in Information Systems from the University of the Cumberlands and is an active open source contributor and community organizer, leading the Tampa Bay Data Engineering and Python groups.

At Certus Core, Joe oversees all data operations and ontology engineering for the company's flagship sKG (semantic Knowledge Graph) platform, enabling natural language queries across complex, fragmented datasets for defense and enterprise clients.

Certus Core has raised $1.6M in seed funding from TampaBay Ventures and Capital Q Ventures, and supports operational missions across the U.S. Navy, Air Force, USSOCOM, and NASA.