My name is Justin McNichol. I founded Cognielo on the premise that your private life deserves better than the ad-tech-funded apps running on your phone right now.
I've watched the "AI for productivity" space get built in the same pattern as every consumer software category before it — partners and connectors that quietly sell the user's data to whoever pays for the table scraps. Every app that touches your health, money, calendar, messages, or relationships has a quiet incentive to read more of you than it strictly needs. Those incentives compound. You end up with a phone full of apps that know you better than anyone in your life, and none of them work for you.
Cognielo's architecture is the inverse. 20 surfaces — 8 life-domain apps (money, health, legal, work, home, learning, hobbies, social), 11 ecosystem & utility apps, and the Hub orchestrator — sharing one encrypted brain on your phone. Cross-correlated locally, ranked locally, surfaced locally. I literally cannot read your data. Not because I promise, because I designed the encryption so I couldn't if I wanted to. The patent filing describes it end-to-end; the threat model names every residual risk we've identified.
What I won't do
- I won't sell your data. Not to advertisers, not to data brokers, not to insurers, not to law enforcement without due process.
- I won't run telemetry or analytics. I won't know which features you used. I won't know when you opened the app.
- I won't hire ad-tech people. The culture of that industry is incompatible with what we're building.
- I won't add "AI features" to pad the roadmap. Every surface has to pass a utility test: does this actually make the user's life better on a Thursday afternoon?
- I won't dark-pattern you into Pro. If you want Free, Free works. Most users never upgrade, and that's fine.
What I will do
- Ship weekly. Even when it's unglamorous.
- Publish the threat model. Update it after every incident. Be honest about what I got wrong.
- Pay researchers who find flaws. First in Pro subscriptions and public credit; in cash once we're revenue-positive.
- Keep the company small and slow. The best thing I can build is something I can still see the whole of.
- Stay in Colorado. Build where I live, not where venture capital thinks I should live.
Why now
The cost of on-device reasoning dropped below the cost of server-side reasoning this year. Apple Intelligence, on-device Whisper, open-weight models small enough to run in your pocket — the table stakes moved. What used to require a server farm to answer "how's my week going" now fits on a phone. The architectural bet behind Cognielo wasn't possible three years ago. It's barely possible today. It'll feel obvious in three years.
If the privacy arguments don't move you, the economic ones should. An app that doesn't send your data anywhere doesn't pay server bills. An app that doesn't need to identify you doesn't need a regulatory department. An app that can't read your data can't be subpoenaed for its contents. Three cost centers competitors pay that Cognielo doesn't.
If you're reading this
You're probably a founder, a journalist, a security researcher, or someone who's quietly built up more distrust of their phone than they want to admit. All three are welcome. The waitlist is at the bottom of the homepage. The press inbox is press@cognielo.com. The security inbox is security@cognielo.com. If you want to invest or partner, bd@cognielo.com.
I read everything. I respond to most of it. Thanks for looking.
— Justin McNichol
Founder, CEO / CTO, Cognielo
Elo AI · Greeley, Colorado
Patent Pending — U.S. App. No. 64/041,821 (Apr 16, 2026)