Welcome to our Featured Founder series, where you’ll meet startup founders from Tampa-St. Petersburg, who are building and scaling their ventures to solve some of the world’s greatest challenges. We interviewed Samir Hassan, CEO of Critikality, which provides edge-deployed face-verified workforce intelligence for high-hazard industries via 56ms verification, real-time certification and permit checks, and unauthorized activity alerts in under 90 seconds.

Please provide a brief one-liner about your company.

We provide edge-deployed face-verified workforce intelligence for high-hazard industries via 56ms verification, real-time certification and permit checks, and unauthorized activity alerts in under 90 seconds.

What were you doing previously, and what inspired you to launch your company?

I spent 8 years organizing exclusive conferences for Saudi Aramco executives — flying speakers worldwide to Dhahran, managing events with 5,000+ attendees. During turnarounds, I saw firsthand how refineries struggled to verify who was actually on site. Badges got shared, certifications expired unnoticed, and incidents happened because the wrong person was in the wrong place. When PBF Martinez exploded in February 2025 — $511M loss, 173 OSHA violations — the root cause was inadequate contractor verification. I knew I could solve this.

What pain point is your company solving? What gets you excited to go to work every day?

Badges verify credentials, not people. In high-hazard industries, that gap kills. We verify the actual person holding the badge in 56 milliseconds, check their certifications in real-time, and deliver a 90-second emergency muster. What gets me excited is knowing that every deployment could prevent the next Martinez. When a refinery safety manager tells me “this is something I’ve never seen in 30 years” — that’s why we do this.

Name the biggest challenge you faced in the process of launching the company. How did you overcome it?

Building edge AI that works in harsh industrial environments — extreme temperatures, low light, workers in hard hats and PPE, and zero internet connectivity for days. We overcame it by deploying on NVIDIA Jetson with TensorRT optimization, achieving 56ms verification that works 72 hours offline. Every image stays on-premise. We got accepted into NVIDIA Inception, SAP PartnerEdge, and Axis Technology Integration programs — validating our technical approach.

Where do you see your company headed next?

Closing our first paid pilots — Saudi Aramco’s Ras Tanura has requested deployment for their April turnaround. We’re raising $1.25M pre-seed to deploy 2-3 US reference sites, hire two engineers, and scale. Beyond oil & gas, the same problem exists in mining, construction, LNG, and power generation. $85B global TAM. We start with refineries because that’s where our relationships are — then expand horizontally.

Give us a tactical piece of advice that you’d share with another founder just starting out.

Build for the buyer, not the user. In enterprise, the person who writes the check isn’t the person who uses the product daily. Understand the VP’s pain — regulatory exposure, liability, audit trails — and make that the headline. The technical specs matter, but the business case closes the deal.

Why Florida?

Tampa is home. My family is here, my network is here, and Florida’s business climate lets me focus on building instead of fighting bureaucracy. More importantly, Florida is becoming a hub for industrial technology — the energy corridor, port infrastructure, and aerospace all need what we’re building.