I kept hitting the same wall.
I wanted to use AI for real work — research, decisions, connecting ideas across projects. But every tool that was smart enough to be useful required handing over my data. And every tool that kept my data private didn’t know enough about my context to give useful answers.
Meanwhile I was reinventing wheels constantly — re-researching things I’d already figured out because I couldn’t find where I’d put the answer. The knowledge was there. It was just scattered across a dozen tools and formats, none of them talking to each other.
I’m always looking for a good puzzle. This felt like one worth solving.
We looked for something that already solved this. There are note-taking apps that search well but can’t do anything with what you’ve saved. AI tools that give useful answers but require your data on their servers. Enterprise knowledge platforms that are private but need an IT department to run. Personal apps that are easy to use but don’t scale to teams. Nothing brought it all together — private, searchable, intelligent, and yours.
So we built one. THE WHEEL is a private knowledge engine — a place where everything you save is connected, encrypted, and yours.
Your context should work for you.
Everything you've researched, decided, and learned should compound for your benefit — whether you're a person or a company. You shouldn't have to start from scratch on things you've already figured out.
The Principle at Every Scale
The same principle applies whether you're an individual managing your personal life or a company trying to preserve institutional knowledge.
For You (Launching Soon)
You planned a party last year. What worked? What didn’t? Who came? You shouldn’t have to remember all of this — or start over. Same for your health patterns, recipes you’ve tried, trips you’ve taken, gifts you’ve given. Your personal context will compound over time — so the answers you get tomorrow are smarter than the ones you got today.
For Teams (Coming After Launch)
What did your team try last quarter? What worked? What failed? New team members shouldn't have to rediscover what the team already knows. Institutional knowledge should compound, not walk out the door. THE WHEEL will help your team's context work for your team.
The principle is the same at every level. We're starting with personal use because it's the simplest demonstration of the value — but the architecture is built to scale from day one.
How THE WHEEL Was Built
What happens when nothing you learn gets lost.
The Approach
Every feature started with a goal. "I want AI chat where the server can't see the content." That was the starting point for the privacy architecture. Not "let me learn cryptography first." Just: what has to be true for that to work?
Then decomposition. Break the goal into what has to be true. Break those into smaller pieces. Keep going until you hit something you can actually test. Research what exists. Try it. See why it fails. Failures are data. Every dead end teaches you something about the actual constraints. Keep what worked, feed it into the next attempt, try again.
Knowledge compounding collapsed the research cycle. Instead of months re-learning whether an approach would work, it surfaced in seconds.
Built With THE WHEEL
THE WHEEL was built using THE WHEEL.
Every research thread, failed experiment, architecture decision, and the reasoning behind it was captured in the system as it was being built. When a new problem came up, the answer often already existed — buried in a previous exploration that would have been forgotten otherwise.
Approaches that failed in one context turned out to be solutions in another. Weeks of prior research surfaced in seconds when it became relevant again.
This is the thesis of the product, proven by the process of building it: when your knowledge compounds, you move faster — not because you skip steps, but because you never lose what you've already learned.
Where This Is Going
What we're building toward.
We believe AI should work for you, not the other way around. Your data should make your experience better — not train someone else's model or target you with ads.
THE WHEEL is being built from the ground up with privacy as a foundation, not an afterthought. The goal is a knowledge engine that's genuinely helpful because it understands your context, and genuinely private because it's cryptographically protected from unauthorized access.
We're launching personal accounts first — a private space where your notes, documents, and conversations compound into something useful over time. After that, we'll bring the same principles to teams: shared knowledge that compounds across people, with privacy boundaries that are mathematical, not just policy.
The mission stays the same at every stage: AI that's private, contextual about you, and always yours.
Meet the Founder
Alie Cohen
Alie Cohen spent more than 20 years as a product leader building data platforms and developer tools across healthcare, insurance, and enterprise software — at companies including Particle Health, NYeC, Redesign Health, Microsoft, Rapt, Inmar Intelligence, and Risk Management Solutions.
Her background is in making complex systems work for the people who use them.
Your thinking shouldn’t be someone else’s training data. You own your information. Sharing is opt-in.
THE WHEEL is what happens when someone who thinks in systems gets access to tools that let them actually build across domains. The product exists because she needed it. Now she's building it for everyone else who does too.