What was Cortex Automation?
Cortex Automation (also known as Cortex, MeetCortex, and Watchtower) was an illegitimate enterprise and self-styled marketing SaaS startup that principally acted as a front for stealing software, defrauding customers, and misleading investors.
How Cortex Was Founderered
Origin: December 2012
The project that became Cortex Automation was founded in late 2012 and added its first paying customers in 2013. It was a social media analytics tool that provided advanced metrics on your competitors’ Facebook pages.
Theft: May 2014
Brennan White and Matt Peters stole it and renamed it Cortex.
Fraud: 2014 - 2023
They started claiming it was an “AI” to impress potential investors and customers. In reality, Cortex used nothing more than basic arithmetic and publicly available data. Matt and Brennan hired one developer to make Cortex show customers fake data, and another who copied source code belonging to his previous employer into Cortex and spent years trying to copy Buffer.
Investors including Jere Doyle and Techstars Boston knew Cortex was a sham and gave them money anyway. Journalists from The Boston Herald, VentureBeat, and elsewhere knew Matt and Brennan had lied to them and ignored it. Organizations such as the Young Entrepreneur’s Council knew too. In all, Cortex defrauded investors out of $2 million from 2014 to 2021, and never managed to copy Buffer.
Foundering: 2021 - 2023
After Cortex finished Techstars, it released a complete redesign, which was terribly designed and frequently just returned gibberish. No one at the company noticed that while they were working on this amateurish new version:
- most of the major social networks started restricting API access
- Companies like OpenAI started releasing products that, to say the least, didn’t return unintelligible gibberish
Cortex lost 80% of its revenue in 3 years. In 2022, against projected revenues of $6,000,000, actual revenue was $250,000. Cortex shut down in 2023. The founderers now operate 71 West, a content marketing agency that makes a couple of TikTok or Instagram videos a year. They have not returned the software they stole to its owner.
Meet Cortex’s Founderers
Additional Data Resources
Cortex Automation in the Press
Hanna Green reported Cortex’s foundering (An AI startup from Techstars Boston’s class of 2020 shuts down) for BostInno.
Further Reading
- Keep Your AI Claims In Check: The Federal Trade Commission’s guidance on how to not be misrepresent your company as an AI startup like Cortex Automation did.
Contact
About Us
This is the official web site of the Foundering of Cortex Automation. Our mission is to ensure that Cortex’s Foundering, and our knowledge of its origins, persists.