Built for the 120,000 contractors who have to get this right.
Tolerance is an AI-native CMMC compliance platform for defense contractors. We deliver CMMC Level 2 implementation at a fixed price, in 6–8 weeks, reviewed by certified CMMC specialists — because the incumbent industry cannot serve the volume that enforcement now requires.
Why we exist
DFARS 252.204-7012 has been in Department of Defense contracts since 2015. For a decade, contractors self-attested compliance with NIST SP 800-171. When the DoD's own auditors started checking, over 75% of the companies that had attested 110 of 110 controls had not actually implemented them.
In November 2025 self-attestation ended. CMMC became federal law. Every DoD contract issued after November 2026 requires independent third-party certification from a C3PAO. There are roughly 70 authorized C3PAOs. There are 120,000+ contractors who need certification. The math does not work.
Traditional consultancies charge $120k–$300k over 6–9 months on hourly billing. At that price and that pace, serving the Defense Industrial Base at scale is mathematically impossible. That gap is the reason Tolerance exists.
How we think
Compliance is a product, not a project
The incumbent CMMC industry is structured around hourly billing, which means it is financially rewarded for every week a project drags on. We price by deliverable, not by effort, so the incentive flips.
AI accelerates. Humans certify.
We use AI to generate documentation, map evidence, and calculate compliance posture — then a certified CMMC specialist reviews every artifact before it ships. Neither half works alone.
Built for the actual contractor
Most of the Defense Industrial Base is not a tech unicorn. It is a 40-person machine shop in Ohio with a mill, a welding bay, and a shared drive. The platform is built for that environment first.
Evidence over theater
A binder of certified policies is not compliance. Live controls with hash-verified evidence, mapped to assessment objectives, and defensible in an interview is compliance. We built the product to show the second thing.
The team
Tolerance is a small, deliberately focused team combining defense-compliance practitioners and product engineers. Our compliance side includes certified CMMC Registered Practitioners and Lead Assessors with direct experience inside C3PAO engagements. Our engineering side comes from AI infrastructure, developer tools, and high-assurance platforms. We hire for the intersection — people who understand both what an assessor is actually looking for and how to build a product that produces it.
Want to see what we've built?
Book a 30-minute walkthrough with the team.