Dr. Joshua Scarpino, founder of Assessed Intelligence, has accepted an invitation to the Harvard Business School Foundry Startup Bootcamp, representing Assessed Solutions, the company’s product subsidiary. The eight-week program began October 1, 2026. Top founders from the Bootcamp are invited to Foundry Catalyst, HBS’s selective flagship program for founders moving from first pitch to first check, and from there to the Foundry Pitch Event at Harvard Business School, where founders compete for $100,000 in non-dilutive funding.
We are sharing this for one reason. It puts the problem we are building against in front of people whose job is to be skeptical, and it sets a clear bar, Catalyst selection, by which to judge whether our approach holds up.
Foundry is one of two programs backing Assessed Solutions this fall. In October 2026 the company was also accepted into the Google for Startups Cloud Program, which provides Google Cloud credits, Startup Success Managers and Customer Engineering support to pre-seed through Series A companies. Together, the two give Assessed Govern what a continuous assurance platform needs most at this stage: the infrastructure to build and test on, and a rigorous audience to prove it to.
What Harvard Foundry Is
HBS Foundry is Harvard Business School’s program for early-stage founders. It runs in three stages. The Startup Bootcamp is an eight-week, online program structured as sprints: define the problem, map the market, validate, build a traction strategy, develop the pitch. Foundry takes no equity and makes no claim on participants’ intellectual property. According to Fortune, more than 760 founders had taken part as of August 2026.
Foundry Catalyst is the selective second stage. HBS describes it as highly selective and high-touch, built for founders ready to move from first pitch to first check: curated sessions with Harvard faculty and experts, structured feedback from investors and operators, and work on strategy, pitch and funding path. Only top founders from the Bootcamp are invited.
The third stage is the Pitch Event at Harvard Business School, where Catalyst founders pitch to public- and private-sector funders and advisors and compete for $100K in funding. HBS lists the live Catalyst program for 2027.
Why it matters to us: Catalyst is not a course. It is a filter. The people giving feedback are the same people who decide whether a governance product is worth backing. That is exactly the audience Assessed Solutions needs to convince.
Why Assessed Solutions
Assessed Solutions exists to turn what Assessed Intelligence does by hand into software. For three years our advisors, vCISOs and auditors have assessed AI systems inside defense, healthcare, finance and public-sector organizations. The pattern is consistent: policies are written, frameworks are adopted, and 76% of critical-sector companies still have AI risk governance gaps.* The gaps are not in the paperwork. They are in the distance between what the policy says and what the system actually does.
Our first product, Assessed Govern, closes that distance. Instead of questionnaires and point-in-time reviews, Govern connects to where AI systems are built and run (source repositories, cloud environments, identity, pipelines), builds a manifest of each system’s models, agents, tools, permissions and data interactions, and evaluates it against the ARISE Framework®. Because ARISE™ already maps to NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001, ISO/IEC 27001, the EU AI Act, GDPR, SOC 2 and others, an organization assesses once and reports across every framework it is held to. When the system changes, the assessment changes with it.
That is the case Dr. Scarpino is making at Foundry: a governance problem that is measurable, a product that measures it continuously, and a team that has already done the work manually enough times to know what good looks like. Assessed Solutions operates under Assessed Intelligence, a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business.
The Timeline
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Assessed Solutions is established as the product subsidiary of Assessed Intelligence, with a single mandate: turn the governance work our advisors and auditors do by hand into software. Assessed Govern, the first product, enters alpha.
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Dr. Joshua Scarpino accepts an invitation to the Harvard Business School Foundry Startup Bootcamp on behalf of Assessed Solutions. Foundry takes no equity and makes no claim on participants’ intellectual property.
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Eight structured sprints: define the problem, map the market, validate with customers, build a traction strategy and develop a funding-ready pitch. Each sprint ends in a deliverable with structured feedback from Harvard faculty and operators. Program details.
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Assessed Solutions is accepted into the Google for Startups Cloud Program, which provides Google Cloud credits, Startup Success Managers and Customer Engineering support to early-stage companies. This is the infrastructure Assessed Govern is built and tested on. Program details.
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The Bootcamp concludes with a funding-ready pitch. In parallel, Assessed Govern opens a private beta with design partners, running continuous ARISE Framework® assessments against live AI systems.
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Top founders from the Bootcamp are invited into Foundry Catalyst, HBS’s selective, high-touch program for founders moving from first pitch to first check. Selection is the bar we are working toward.
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Curated sessions with Harvard experts, feedback from investors and operators, and work on strategy, pitch and funding path. About Catalyst.
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Catalyst founders take the stage at Harvard Business School, pitch to public- and private-sector funders and advisors, and compete for $100,000 in funding.
We will update this timeline as HBS confirms Catalyst selections and 2027 dates.
What It Means for Our Clients
Nothing changes in how Assessed Intelligence serves you. IMPLEMENT, OPERATE and VALIDATE continue as they are, delivered by the same advisors, vCISOs, vCRAIOs and auditors. What changes is what sits underneath those engagements. Foundry gives Assessed Solutions a structured path to fund and ship Assessed Govern, and every client on an OPERATE retainer or in a VALIDATE audit will be among the first to run it against their own systems.
If you want to see where your AI governance stands today, before the software does it for you, start with the ARISE Maturity Assessment: seven pillars, about six minutes, a risk score calibrated to your industry.
If you are an investor, design partner or operator who wants to follow the Foundry journey, speak with an advisor or write to sales@assessedintelligence.com.
Sources: HBS Foundry Startup Bootcamp · HBS Foundry programs · hbsfoundry.org · Google for Startups Cloud Program · Fortune, August 25, 2026 · Assessed Intelligence Research, Q1 2026. The ARISE name and symbol are registered trademarks of Assessed Intelligence.
