KnoMe is the consent layer the internet was always missing — a family-owned data pod that travels with the person across every institution, never held hostage by any of them.
The data serves the person. By design. By patent.
The infrastructure layer
KnoMe is not an app. It is infrastructure — the cryptographic consent and data sovereignty layer beneath health records, academic credentials, and employer benefits. Each market runs on the same core: SOLID pods, Fluree consent ledger, and the Human Guardian Module.
Three markets
Each vertical addresses a broken data relationship — between patient and provider, student and institution, employee and insurer. KnoMe inverts all three: the person owns the record, and institutions earn access.
Why it's defensible
KnoMe's competitive advantage is not a feature set — it is a structural impossibility. The platform cannot be compelled to sell, breach, or monetize family data because it doesn't hold any. This is patented at the claims level.
Anti-Dependency Architecture
While the rest of the AI industry competes to maximize engagement and time-on-platform, KnoMe is the first platform to patent the opposite: a structural requirement that the AI actively work to reduce dependency, build human capability, and hand off to real people.
Human-in-the-Loop Escalation
The Wellbeing Shift Indicator detects early behavioral change. The Human Guardian Module ensures a licensed professional responds. The escalation path is student-initiated, privacy-preserving, and structurally guaranteed — not dependent on an institution noticing.
EU pilot
FAME (Future Albanian Minds Empowered) is KnoMe's EU-based pilot deployment — running the full sovereign infrastructure stack with K–12 students in Kosovo. It is the first proof point that the architecture works at ground level in a non-US regulatory environment, and the template for country-scale sovereign data utilities worldwide.
Traction
The origin
It began in a free clinic in Maricopa, Arizona, where a physician drove out to give polio vaccinations to migrant farmworkers who could not pay — and came back the next month, and the month after that, for years.
I earned my B.S. at Arizona State University. I went on to complete an MBA at Boston College and an M.A. in Ethics at Providence College. For two years I worked at a medical ethics think tank — then affiliated with Aetna, CIGNA, and Willis Towers Watson — where I asked questions about the ethics of health data, the ownership of clinical information, and the responsibilities of institutions toward the people whose data they hold. Those questions never left me. They became, decades later, the philosophical architecture of what I built.
I spent years in healthcare and insurance — Aetna, CIGNA, Willis Towers Watson — working at the intersection of health data, institutional decision-making, and individual vulnerability. I then co-founded and ran Academy Learning, an innovative learning center in Sacramento, for ten years. That decade gave me a ground-level education in how children actually learn, where they get lost, and what the difference is between a system designed for institutional convenience and one designed for the child.
Before all of that — in 1982 and 1983 — I spent a formative year in Finland. It was the first of three visits I made to the former Soviet Union and its borderlands during the 1980s. Those years shaped how I understood what sovereignty means to people who have lived without it, and what education means in a culture that has had to fight for the right to teach its own children in its own language.
I was traveling through the Balkans and Eastern Europe, headed toward a PhD in East Central European political economy. I was in Sarajevo when Slobodan Milosevic announced the rescission of Kosovo's constitutional autonomy. I watched residents stop in the street. The reaction was not political analysis. It was the physical shock that precedes grief — or war.
I did not fully understand what I was witnessing. I understood it better over the following decade as the wars Milosevic's announcement signaled unfolded across the region. What I saw in Sarajevo in 1989 did not leave me. It became part of the lens through which I later understood what education, mental health, and data sovereignty actually mean in societies where institutions have been used as instruments of suppression — and where the generation born after liberation carries, in their bodies and their families, the weight of what came before.
In 1989 — the same year I witnessed Milosevic's announcement in Sarajevo — Dr. Fatmir Sejdiu co-founded the Democratic Union of Kosovo in direct response to the same event. In 2003 he spent a semester at ASU. In 2006 he became President of Kosovo. He is identified as FAME's founding advisor; outreach is pending.
Between 1995 and 2000, Dr. Pamela Cantor led the Eastern European Child Abuse Project across the precise geopolitical corridor surrounding Kosovo. Her clinical work with traumatized children became the scientific foundation for Turnaround for Children — work now carried forward through ASU's Center for Whole-Child Education. KnoMe's platform is designed to be complementary to that science, and Dr. Cantor is among the advisors we hope to engage as the platform develops. The clinical line from that 1995 Balkans work runs directly to Prishtina in 2026.
My friend Behar Shala was fifteen years old when Kosovo was invaded in 1998. He is now the Director of multiple K-8 schools in Kosovo. His wife is a UK-certified special education teacher. They are not institutional partners in the conventional sense. They are the people who stayed, who built Kosovo's educational infrastructure from nothing, and who understand what is owed to the children growing up in what their generation survived. Behar is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of FAME.
Finland. Sarajevo. A medical ethics think tank. Ten years in a learning center. Decades in healthcare watching institutions make decisions about people's most sensitive information with no accountability to the people whose information it was.
All of that built the architecture I filed a patent on in June 2026. Not because I planned it that way. Because the same questions kept surfacing in different forms, and eventually I had both the time and the tools to answer them.
KnoMe is the attempt to make that covenant technically enforceable.
We're raising a seed round to complete the Kosovo pilot, file the non-provisional patent, and scale across all three market verticals.
Request a conversation →