Gugen · Cortex
Private intelligence, on your premises.
Cortex is an appliance you plug into your own network. It reads your mail, your documents and the systems you already run, builds a working memory of how your company actually operates, and puts a team of agents on top of it. Your data never goes to anyone else's cloud, because there isn't one.
Cortex appliance BootingWaiting for networkReady
The problem
Why a box
Most AI products ask you to upload your company to a data centre you don't control, in a country you didn't choose, under terms that can change. For a regulated business — or simply a careful one — that ends the conversation before it starts.
An appliance inverts it. The data stays where it already is, and the intelligence comes to the data. You own the hardware. You hold the keys. Nothing has to be trusted to a third party, because nothing is handed to one.
What it is
A memory, and a team that uses it
Corporate memory
Cortex ingests mail, documents, file shares and the systems you already run, and turns them into something you can ask questions of — attributed to its source, and scoped so people see only what they are entitled to see.
A configurable team
A chief of staff, a researcher, a document studio, and specialists you define per function. They share one memory and one set of rules, so the answer from one is consistent with the answer from another.
Its own model, on the box
Routine work runs on the appliance's own model, in your building, at no per-token cost. When a job genuinely needs a frontier model, the box records exactly what left.
Sealed on arrival
It ships pre-imaged and encrypted. You plug in power and a network cable — no keyboard, no screen, no operating system login. Your IT team administers the application, not the machine.
Stated plainly
What leaves the building
Never leaves
- Your documents and your mail
- Your file shares and databases
- Credentials, keys and secrets
Leaves only when you allow it
- The text of a specific question sent to an external model — logged and attributed, under a policy you set
- A heartbeat telling us the appliance is alive, carrying none of your content
- Signed software updates, coming in
Every external call is written to an audit log you own and can read. If you would rather nothing left at all, the appliance runs on its own model alone.
Who is building it
Built by someone who ran the problem first
Gugen is a new company. It is the work of an engineer who spent the last decade running a financial services group with more than R15 billion under management, and building the platforms that run it — the document systems, the data platform, and the internal agents that turned out to be the interesting part.
Cortex is that work rebuilt properly: a product that belongs to no one else's stack and binds to no one else's systems.
Early access
Talk to us
The first appliances go to a small number of design partners during 2026. If your company has data it can't send away, and work it would like to hand over, we would like to hear from you.
hello@gugen.co.za