CIA-linked private intel firm resold Clearview AI licenses to U.S. Special Forces
The Virginia Beach-based commercial data surveillance firm Octaris resold five Clearview AI licenses to U.S. Special Forces on March 17.
The Virginia Beach-based commercial intelligence firm Octaris Technologies was the intermediary for a previously announced sale in March of five licenses of the internationally banned American facial recognition firm Clearview AI to the parent organization of the Green Berets, according to a newly public procurement summary.
“Without Clearview AI, DoD cannot rapidly analyze vast amounts of facial data, which makes it challenging to identify high-value targets with the required rate of accuracy needed for 1st Special Forces Group [sic],” stated a March justification for limiting competition for the contract.1
The official U.S. federal procurement database revealed on Tuesday that Octaris was the recipient of a $78,750 purchase order on March 17 with the Fayetteville-based Fort Bragg and its tenant unit, 1st Special Forces Command (Airborne), which is best known as the parent organization of U.S. Army Special Forces, widely known as the Green Berets.2 The contract comes roughly one year after a $75,000 purchase order directly between 1st Special Forces Command and Clearview AI and, as recently revealed by this publication, the U.S. State Department is currently in the process of purchasing Clearview AI licenses for a special services unit (DIPRO) of the Colombian National Police.
(Clearview AI licenses have also been purchased by U.S. Government agencies through the special operations-affiliated firm NexTech Solutions, which maintains a secured and palatial facility just north of the Dale Mabry entrance of MacDill Air Force Base, which the author recently visited.)
Octaris is led by chief executive Christopher J. Blake, who served as an intelligence officer in the elite Tactical Development Squadron 3 (TACDEVRON 3) of the U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team Six for more than a year prior to becoming director of intelligence and information warfare at the Navy Expeditionary Warfighting Development Center (EXWDC) in Virginia Beach circa early 2020 to late 2021.
Octaris’s first institutional investor, the Huntington Beach-based Leonid Capital Partners, pitched the company in late April as “founded in 2024 by eight co-founders with more than 200 years of combined experience across the Navy, SOCOM, CIA, and NSA.” Octaris’s website further advertises the company’s central service as leveraging “proprietary data holdings, publicly available information (PAI), and commercially available information (CAI) to provide precise, actionable insights.”
Octaris’s largest public contract with the Pentagon was a $1.2 million agreement in late August to provide roughly 18 months of access to the company’s flagship platform, SOFOS, which the procurement summary described as an “AI-enabled real time environment [for] understanding and entity resolution for the DoD.” Thanks to the contract taking the form of a Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award, a more revelatory summary of the agreement is separately published at sbir.gov:
Octaris, and our development partner Adelphi Data, have joined together to develop SOFOS, a granular level environmental understanding and entity resolution platform, for CDAO [Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office]. SOFOS leverages unique identifiers and attributes of publicly available and commercially available data to develop and deliver insights into patterns and trends in a given operating environment as well as develop associations, activities, and indications related to selected entity activity (e.g., people, places, things, and activity) of interest to the Department of Defense (DoD). SOFOS specializes in automatically and intuitively ‘connecting the dots’ across disparate datasets, with a focus on individual and organizational patterns, trends, associations, and actions as related to a given location(s), function(s), and desired end state(s) of the DoD.
The partnership between Octaris and Adelphi to supply the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) with the SOFOS commercial intelligence platform does not appear to be elsewhere publicly documented, and neither of the two firms immediately responded to requests for comment.
The McLean-based Adelphi Data is similarly transparent about the firm’s relationship to U.S. intelligence agencies, stating that the company “is built by a team with deep experience across national security, intelligence operations, and large-scale data infrastructure.” Adelphi’s chief executive, Kartik Chopra, publicly discloses his past work as an intelligence officer in an unnamed branch of the “U.S. Intelligence Community” from mid-2015 to mid-2020. Adelphi also prominently advertises a former head of the CIA’s domestic operations, Ralph F. Goff, as an advisor.
Adelphi maintains significantly closer ties to the commercial advertising technology world than Octaris, thanks to former LiveRamp chief executive Travis May serving as a co-founder and board member. Mr. Chopra also recently reshared a video interview with Goff published last month by Auren Hoffman, the founder of controversial phone-tracking firm SafeGraph and a fellow former chief executive of LiveRamp who was also a board member of May’s health information technology company, Datavant.
(LiveRamp was reported to have sold its cellphone location-tracking business to the location intelligence firm Cuebiq in 2019.)
Two of the founding partners of Octaris’s first institutional investor, Leonid Capital Partners, in mid-2022 further joined the board of the private investigations firm Justice Solutions Group, whose OnTrial private intelligence platform sells location-centric analysis of “the digital and physical footprint” of targets, summarized as “Where they’ve been. What they’ve posted. Who they’re connected to.” Beyond the bold slogan of “Every footprint, fully mapped,” OnTrial advertises the ability to provide several categories of “pattern of life” geolocational information, including “Home, work, and frequented locations” as well as “unknown associations.”
Octaris, Leonid Capital Partners, and Adelphi Data did not immediately respond to requests for comment regarding whether their firms have collaborated with OnTrial.
Corrected on June 16, 2026 at 4:40 p.m. ET to note that the Tampa location of NexTech Solutions is not the company’s headquarters.
1st Special Forces Group (Airborne) is the primarily Asia-focused branch of the Green Berets, which are in turn a component of 1st Special Forces Command (Airborne). It is unclear if the contract justification mistakenly confused 1st Group with 1st SFC(A).
The procurement instrument identifier (PIID) for the purchase order is W9124726PA016, and the contract is scheduled to appear in USASpending.gov on Wednesday. All-Source Intelligence retrieved the contract summary from the still-active FPDS.gov ATOM feed, which has continued to operate despite FPDS.gov itself being replaced by SAM.gov early this year.