Why I built this.

Somewhere in Google Keep is a note that matters to me. I know it exists. I have no idea where.

That is not a joke — it was the actual state of my notes for years. Not organized. Not searchable in any way that worked. Just a pile of yellow scraps growing on a phone, findable only by luck. If you have ever lost something important inside your own notes app, you already know exactly the feeling I'm describing.

So I went looking for something better. I tried close to ten different notes apps, one after another. Each one failed the same test in a different way. The pretty ones were useless. The powerful ones were unusable. Every one of them asked for my trust, and not one of them had earned it.

By then, AI could do almost anything — summarize a meeting, find a pattern buried in a thousand pages, answer a question you hadn't finished asking. And somehow, not a single notes app was using any of it well. The ones that tried just handed my private thoughts to a model with no restrictions, no boundary on what it could see, no record of what it had touched. That wasn't a feature. That was a nightmare wearing one.

So I started reading the privacy policies. Not skimming — reading. Then I went further and looked at how these companies' backends actually worked. What I found should worry you more than it apparently worries most people. What some of these “simple little notes apps” can quietly do with your data would stop you cold.

I had already built a rough version of this myself — a small notes tool that ran locally in a browser, nothing fancy, just something that worked the way I wanted. I decided to put it in my pocket, so I rebuilt it in React for my phone.

It was bad. Embarrassingly bad.

I looked at what I'd built, and I threw the whole thing away.

That failure is what sent me looking harder. I went back through every notes app I could find, this time not asking “does this look nice” but “could I trust this with my actual life.” Every single time, the honest answer was no. Nothing on the market gave me real intelligence and real security at once. Everyone had picked one. Nobody had built both.

I called it the Private Intelligence Engine — something so private that not even the people who built it can see what you put inside it. That is not the same sentence as “we encrypt your data” or “we're zero-knowledge, trust us.” Every company says that now. It's a checkbox.

What I set out to build was different. Take the best privacy and security practices software has produced in the last forty years — decades of real, adversarial, battle-tested engineering — and fuse all of it into one engine built to be truly intelligent and entirely yours at the same time, with no compromise between the two. Before a single note-taking feature existed, the engine alone took eight months of research just to work out how any of this was possible at all.

Here is the part I'm proudest of. Most security is built to keep an attacker out. I built this assuming one is already in.

Assume your device is already compromised — not by an amateur, but by the most sophisticated tools the world has ever built: forensic extraction kits like Cellebrite and GrayKey, the ones law enforcement uses to crack a locked phone in minutes. Zero-click spyware like NSO Group's Pegasus, which can infect a device without you touching anything at all. Cell-site simulators that impersonate a tower just to listen in. Oh yeah — and don't forget about TikTok :)

I want to set a new standard for what privacy and security are supposed to mean. Nothing bothers me more than not trusting the software I use — that quiet, constant feeling that every tap, every scroll, every word you type is being sold or logged somewhere you have no access to and no control over, protected by keys you don't even hold.

That is wrong. I don't understand how we, as a society, ever agreed to let that become normal.

I want to change that.