A self-hosted private AI platform that lets healthcare organizations deploy powerful language models without sending a single byte of patient data to the cloud.
Product Strategy
App Development
Healthcare organizations, law firms, and financial institutions were watching the AI revolution happen without them. The promise of large language models - automating documentation, accelerating research, streamlining patient communications - was clear. But every major AI platform required sending data to third-party cloud infrastructure. For organizations bound by HIPAA, SOC 2, or data residency requirements, that was a non-starter. Patient records, legal briefs, and financial documents could not leave the building, let alone travel to an API endpoint controlled by OpenAI or Google. The workarounds were not working either. Air-gapped teams were falling behind competitors who could use AI freely. Some organizations tried building internal tools on top of open-source models, but lacked the engineering depth to build production-grade infrastructure - the kind that handles authentication, audit logging, model orchestration, and user management at scale. They needed a complete platform, not a science project. They needed to deploy AI without sending data to the cloud, and they needed a team that understood both the AI landscape and the compliance constraints of regulated industries.
We built Compass – a self-hosted private AI platform designed from the ground up to run entirely on a customer’s own infrastructure. No data leaves the organization. No API calls route through external servers. The models, the conversations, the documents, and the embeddings all live on hardware the customer controls. We architected Compass so that an IT team can deploy enterprise-grade AI capabilities with the same confidence they would deploy any internal application – behind their own firewall, under their own security policies.
Compass is a self-hosted private AI platform built by Barefoot Labs that enables regulated industries to run private large language models on their own infrastructure while maintaining full HIPAA compliance and zero external data exposure. The platform handles the full stack: model deployment and management, retrieval-augmented generation for organization-specific knowledge bases, granular role-based access controls, complete audit trails for compliance reporting, and seamless integration with existing clinical and business workflows. We designed the architecture to be model-agnostic – organizations can run whichever open-weight LLMs fit their use case, swap models as the ecosystem evolves, and fine-tune on proprietary data without ever exposing that data to a third party.
While we built Compass initially for healthcare – where the compliance requirements are strictest and the cost of a data breach is highest – the architecture is inherently extensible. Legal teams use it to query case law and draft documents against confidential client files. Financial institutions deploy it for internal research and regulatory analysis. Any organization that handles sensitive information and needs AI capabilities without the compliance risk of cloud platforms is a fit. We handled the hard infrastructure and security engineering so that these organizations can focus on what AI actually does for their teams, not on whether it’s safe to use.
To learn how Compass can bring private AI to your organization’s infrastructure, visit barefootlabs.ai.
Self-Hosted
HIPAA Compliant
Air-Gapped
Model-Agnostic
4241 Jutland Dr., Suite 300
San Diego, CA 92117
