About
A lemma is not a lesser theorem.
It is the proven, load-bearing step you are allowed to stand on so a larger result can be reached — the part of the argument that has already been settled, so nobody has to settle it again.
The name
Why we chose it.
That definition turned out to be an unusually exact description of what a software firm sells to a federal agency or to a prime. Not the mission itself — the proven components underneath it. The authentication layer. The data pipeline. The accredited boundary. The parts that were established well enough that the program can build on them without re-litigating them.
Our mark says the same thing without words. It is an L and a detached square which, set together, complete the filled square that closes a mathematical proof. Two pieces, one of them still being placed, resolving into something finished.
We chose it because the vocabulary of proof is the honest vocabulary for this work. A system either holds under load or it does not. The claim is checkable.
The company
How we are built.
Lemma Systems is a Minnesota LLC, formed in 2021. It is one senior engineer, on purpose. The work it sells is a defined piece of software built and handed over by the person who scoped it, and that is not a thing you improve by adding people to it.
The focus is narrow for the same reason: back-office software for public finance and investment operations. Cash-flow and maturity-ladder reporting, investment-policy compliance, the spreadsheet that quietly became load-bearing. Twenty years in production systems sits behind it, fourteen of those in fixed income — CLO, CMBS, and RMBS analytics, where an overnight run has to finish before the desk opens and a wrong number is a real problem rather than a cosmetic one.
We are new to federal contracting and would rather say so than perform a scale we do not have. What is not new is the engineering.
Michael Morrison
Principal
Twenty years building production systems in C#, C++, Java and Python, fourteen of them in fixed income: cash-flow and risk analytics for CLO, CMBS and RMBS portfolios, and the ETL behind them from Bloomberg, Intex, Markit and CoStar. Most recently event-driven services on AWS fronting an enterprise CMBS cash-flow engine.
Principles
What we hold to.
- Show the system, not the slide. Every claim about progress should be something the customer can log into and check.
- Leave it documented. The measure of a good handover is that the next team does not need to call us.
- Bad news early. A schedule risk raised in month two is a management decision. The same risk raised in month nine is a failure.
- Choose boring technology. Federal systems outlive the teams that build them. We pick tools an agency can still hire for in a decade.
- Decline the wrong work. The engagements we turn down protect the ones we take.
Get in touch
Tell us what you are trying to build.
Or what somebody else built that now needs rescuing. Both are conversations worth having.