Private Agentic AI · DAVE Lab

Hand DAVE the busywork.

PDFs, DOCX, spreadsheets, images — every work file read. Calls turned into notes. Replies drafted. Invoices sorted. 14 AI agents doing the work, on a machine you own.

Not your key. Not your agent. DAVE runs on your hardware, so your work stays yours.

The busywork era is over. Agentic work has arrived.

DynamicAgenticVirtualEntity
DAVE mark: three interlocked rings in teal, blue and indigo around a cracked keystone
Tesseract · 4D
x · y · z · w
Private Agentic AIThe DAVE harness14 agentsOn your hardwareOne-time costWorks offline
What is DAVE?

DAVE is Private Agentic AI.

Most AI is rented: a chat window on someone else's servers, billed per seat, gone when you stop paying. DAVE is the opposite. It is a complete agentic AI system, the harness, the agents and the hardware, installed in your office and owned by you.

Private, because it runs on your machine. Agentic, because it does the work, not just the talking.

  1. 01 · The harnessThe DAVE harnessThe engine underneath: the ADAM Agentic Harness schedules, coordinates and supervises every agent, with long-term memory, bridges to your tools, Joon security and an audit trail.
  2. 02 · The team14 agentsDave, the chief of staff, runs thirteen specialists for research, writing, replies, data, briefs, inbox and machine health, tuned to your business.
  3. 03 · PrivateYours to keepYour hardware, your keys, your data. Works offline. One-time cost. Nothing leaves without your approval at the HITL Gate.
Inside DAVE

The DAVE harness: one full agentic stack.

Most AI products rent you the top layer and keep everything underneath. DAVE ships every layer, from the silicon to the approval button, as one installed system.

  1. L6
    HITL Gate + DAVE LedgerYou approve anything that leaves the machine or touches money. Every action is written to the ledger — hash-chained, tamper-evident, verifiable.
  2. L5
    Joon securityHardening sandboxes and signs tools, Godel verifies outputs, DoM routes each decision to the right tier.
  3. L4
    14 specialist agentsDave orchestrates thirteen specialists for research, drafting, code, data, briefs and machine health.
  4. L3
    Memory & bridgesLetta Memory keeps long-term context. BridgeMaintainer and CAMM Bridge connect agents to your tools.
  5. L2
    ADAM Agentic HarnessThe runtime that schedules, coordinates and supervises every agent on the machine.
  6. L1
    Local or cloud LLMsRun models on-device, or plug in a cloud LLM when you choose to. Your call per task.
  7. L0
    Hardware you ownMac mini, NVIDIA DGX Spark or Mac Studio Ultra. Bring your own Mac Studio or Mac mini, or take it pre-configured.

Not your key, not your agent.

If an agent runs on someone else's servers, under someone else's account, it works for them first. With DAVE the machine, the models, the memory and the approval key all stay with you. Nobody can switch it off, read it, or raise the price.

Works with

Built on the open agent ecosystem.

DAVE runs on proven open models, runtimes, memory and protocols, and plugs into the communities building them.

Logos and names are trademarks of their owners, shown to identify technologies DAVE works with. This does not imply partnership or endorsement.

Why teams choose DAVE

Give Dave your busyness so you can focus on your business.

He takes the noise — the forms, the follow-ups, the filing — and brings back finished work with a signature line for you. That's the deal: you stay the boss; the thirteen do the legwork; nothing ships without your yes.

Productivity

Hours of admin, handed off.

PDFs read, calls written up, replies drafted, invoices sorted and your day planned, so you spend your time on the work only you can do.

Fit

Configured for your workflow.

14 specialist agents tuned to your industry, your language and your cadence. Not a generic assistant.

Cost

One setup cost. No monthly fees.

Local LLM and cloud LLM supported. No per-seat charges, no surprise invoices.

Always on

Works fully offline.

Your internet goes down. DAVE does not. Every agent runs on your own machine.

Yours

Your data stays with you.

Files, calls and notes never leave the device, and nothing goes out without your approval.

Where DAVE works

DAVE in practice.

LunaQuillHalo

Legal & Professional Services

Luna, Quill, and Halo run overnight, drafting client memos, summarising briefs, and flagging compliance gaps. Partners arrive to first drafts, not blank screens.

EchoTofu

Creative & Marketing Agencies

Echo and Tofu brainstorm campaign angles, generate copy variants, and review contracts. They act as the junior creative team most small agencies can't afford to hire.

AtlasWrenchBento

Logistics & Retail Operations

Atlas, Wrench, and Bento monitor supplier health, extract invoice data, and deliver daily ops briefings. The floor is informed before the first shift starts.

Real days, made easier

How DAVE eases real lives.

Not demos — the everyday work DAVE takes over, and what the people get back.

Evenings back

The solo accountant.

Quill reads every client email at 6am and drafts replies in his tone; Atlas pulls the day's invoices into one table before he sits down. He reviews, taps approve at the HITL Gate, sends.

“It's like a clerk who never sleeps — but I sign everything.”

Mornings on judgement

The boutique law firm.

Luna and Mochi summarise case files overnight with action items and deadlines; Halo flags compliance gaps; Quill drafts the client memo. Partners edit instead of page-turning.

“We stopped reading briefs at midnight.”

Fires caught early

The retail owner.

Atlas watches supplier emails and stock updates; Wrench keeps the machine healthy; Bento delivers one morning brief — what's late, what sold, who needs a call today.

“Problems reach me before customers do.”

Family time kept

The family admin.

School letters read and calendared, renewals drafted, the week planned over breakfast — all on the family's own machine, nothing on a stranger's cloud.

“Our paperwork finally runs itself. Ours, not theirs.”

Focus kept

The builder's second brain.

Voice memos become decisions and follow-ups (Quill); research questions get chased (Sage); Pico ships the code while Tofu handles the words.

“I stay in flow. The team around me doesn't sleep.”

One inbox, tamed

The trading desk of one.

Pulse watches the inbox and pings only what matters; Bento opens the day with markets and priorities; Tofu drafts every routine reply for a one-tap approve.

“Email stopped being the first hour of my day.”

Sovereignty

Your agents. Your data. Your machine.

We emphasise one thing above all: the agents you run should belong to you — together with every byte of data they touch. DAVE is not an account on someone else's cloud. It is a private workforce installed in your building.

  • Own the hardwareThe Mac Studio and minis sit in your office. Nobody can switch them off, read them, or raise the price.
  • Own the dataFiles, calls, notes and records never leave the building. No cloud sync, no third-party servers.
  • Own the agentsThe 14-agent workforce runs as tools for your people — one team per role, configured for your business.
  • Private by designA private high-speed link joins every node. Nothing leaves without your approval at the HITL Gate.
Creating Agentic DAVE — an example lab
Mac Studio · the brain M5 Ultra · up to 256GB memory Dave harness and the local language models. Serves all three nodes. No cloud calls.

Private high-speed link · nothing leaves the building

Admin Mini 1 · 14 agents

Clinic: front desk
Legal: office admin
Bookings, billing, intake

Practitioner Mini 2 · 14 agents

Clinic: nurse
Legal: junior lawyer
Notes, research, drafts

Senior · top access Mini 3 · 14 agents

Clinic: doctor
Legal: senior lawyer
Review, sign-off, records

An example build: one Mac Studio (the brain) + three Mac minis, one per role. Each mini runs the full 14-agent workforce as tools for that person. Roles shown here are a clinic and a law office — yours get configured the same way, for your people.
The DAVE agent team

Meet the team.

14 specialist agents, each trained for a defined role, running on your hardware, on your schedule, for your business.

Dave, in a purple coat and round glasses, conducting two small floating robot helpers over a night city
DaveChief of Staff, orchestrates the thirteen

Dave, the chief of staff, runs thirteen specialists for research, writing, replies, data, briefs, inbox and machine health, tuned to your business.

Luna in a pink beret, painting starlight with a brush
LunaCreativity & Ideation
Sage, silver-haired with teal glasses, reading a glowing star book
SageCuriosity & Research
Pico with goggles, holding a terminal screen
PicoCoding & Systems
Mochi, pink-haired, searching with a glowing magnifying glass
MochiResearch & Drafting
Quill raising a golden feather quill trailing pages
QuillWriting & Memos
Halo with a golden halo, holding a shield
HaloSafety & Compliance
Pulse in headphones, holding a heartbeat monitor
PulseInbox & System Watch
Tofu with a sprout on his head, holding a clipboard and pencil
TofuDrafting & Engagement
Wrench in a blue cap, raising a wrench among gears
WrenchMachine Health

Also on the team

Echo avatar
EchoImagination & Synthesis
Atlas avatar
AtlasData Collection & Sorting
Bento avatar
BentoMorning Briefs
+ HITL GateHuman-in-the-Loop. Every autonomous action awaits your approval before execution.
DAVE vs others

Private Agentic AI, or rented AI?

There are three ways to get AI agents into a small business today. Here is how they compare on the things that matter once the novelty wears off.

Swipe the table to compare all three →

QuestionDAVEPrivate Agentic AICloud AI subscriptionsHosted assistantsDIY open-source stackFrameworks you assemble
Everyday tools built inPDFs, call notes, replies, translation, invoices, daily plansSpread across apps and plansBuild each one yourself
Where your data livesOn your own deviceOn the vendor's serversOn your machine
Who holds the keysYou doThe vendor doesYou do
What you payOne-time, from US$3,000Per seat, every monthFree software, paid in engineering time
Works offlineYes, every agentNoDepends on your setup
Agents out of the box14 specialists, configured for youOne general assistantBuild and wire them yourself
Human approval gateHITL Gate built inLimited controlsBuild it yourself
Audit trailEvery action in the Audit LedgerVendor-side logsBuild it yourself
Long-term memoryLetta Memory, stored locallyVendor-held memoryAssemble your own
Setup & supportRemote onboarding + 30-day supportSign up and goWeeks of engineering

StrongPartialWeak or missing

Investment · What it costs

Own the full stack.

One investment. Cloud or local LLM. Choose the tier that fits your setup. No subscriptions. No per-seat fees.

The AI team they can't hire, built into a machine they already own.
Tier 1

Harness Only

US$3,000ONE-TIME
  • DAVE harness licence & deployment, full software stack
  • 14 specialist agents configured
  • Bring your own Mac Studio or Mac mini
  • Remote setup & onboarding · 30-day support
Reserve
PRE-ORDER Tier 2

Full Bundle

US$4,500ONE-TIME
  • Everything in Tier 1
  • Mac mini M6 included & pre-configured
  • 12-core CPU · 12-core GPU · 2×16-core Neural Engine
  • 32GB unified memory · 512GB storage
Pre-order
PRE-ORDER Tier 3

DGX Spark

US$12,000ONE-TIME
  • NVIDIA DGX Spark · GB10 Grace Blackwell superchip
  • PetaFLOP-class AI performance (FP4)
  • 128GB LPDDR5x unified memory
  • 4TB NVMe Gen5 · self-encrypting
Pre-order
PRE-ORDER Tier 4

Studio Ultra

US$18,000ONE-TIME
  • Mac Studio · M5 Ultra · 30c CPU · 64c GPU
  • 32-core Neural Engine · 256GB unified memory
  • Large local LLMs fit on device
  • ADAM Agentic Harness included · 2TB storage
Pre-order

Prices in USD. Pre-order subject to availability. Nothing is charged until we confirm your order.

Personal agentic AI

DAVE for one person.

DAVE isn't only for firms. Here are six ways it works for one person.

01

Personal Chief of Staff

A morning brief before you're out of bed: inbox triaged, calendar reshuffled around what actually matters, the one thing that can't slip flagged first. Dave orchestrates; Echo drafts your replies for approval.

02

Family Admin

Bills, renewals, school letters, and appointments extracted from the pile and scheduled. Bento tracks every deadline; Atlas files the documents. Nothing lapses, nothing forgotten.

03

Investor's Desk

A daily digest of markets, holdings, and filings. Pico screens the noise; Pulse watches your positions and surfaces red flags before they cost money.

04

The Builder's Second Brain

Research pulled from everywhere, summarised with citations, and filed into your own vault. Luna and Sage connect the dots; Quill writes it up in your voice.

05

Health & Fitness Coordination

Appointments booked, prescriptions and training logs tracked, gentle nudges at the right hours. Atlas keeps the calendar; Halo keeps the records private on your device.

06

Home Run

Invoices, suppliers, maintenance, and renewals for a home or side business, handled like a back office. Wrench watches the machines; Bento delivers the daily brief.

DAVE Lab

The lab building DAVE.

DAVE Lab is a venture-backed AI lab with one product: DAVE, Private Agentic AI for small firms, builders and anyone who wants an AI team they own. We build the harness, train the agents and install them on your hardware.

  • One productDAVE, built end to end: harness, agents, hardware and support.
  • Private by principleNot your key, not your agent. We never hold your data.
  • Built in the openWith the DAVE Community shaping what ships next.

Backed by

  • Venture partnerTo be announced
  • Venture partnerTo be announced
  • Strategic partnerTo be announced
  • Angel investorsTo be announced

Investor names will be shared as each partner announces. Investors and partners: talk to us on LinkedIn ↗

DAVE Community

We're building the DAVE Community.

A home for the people who run their own agents: small-firm owners, builders, and anyone who believes the keys should stay with the user. Come early and help shape what DAVE becomes.

  • Share workflowsSwap agent setups, prompts and playbooks that already work in real businesses.
  • Shape the roadmapVote on the next agents, integrations and hardware tiers before they ship.
  • Get early accessMembers hear first about pre-orders, betas and new releases of the harness.
  • Build in the openTalk directly with the people building DAVE, and support the build if you want to.

How we build in the open — Discord, on the record

DAVE Lab runs Discord as its working cockpit, and we show it to customers. Every agent posts its work where humans can watch, correct and approve it. This is a live health check Dave posted himself: the DAVE Ledger verifying its own chain.

Real DAVE Lab Discord screenshot: Dave The PA posts an Audit Ledger Health Check — chain intact, 931 hash-chained entries verified across 13 categories, anomalies flagged non-urgent
Real, unedited: #dave-chat — the DAVE Ledger health check. 931 hash-chained entries, chain intact, anomalies flagged before humans even ask. Work in the open, on the record.

Same philosophy as the product: work in the open, humans approve, everything on the record — the DAVE Ledger hash-chains each action so history can’t be quietly rewritten.

DAVE in your pocket — WhatsApp

Dave doesn’t just live on the website. Message him on WhatsApp and he works like a real chief of staff: checks domains, drafts money messages, plans the day — then reports back in plain language. Here’s a real exchange:

Ask DAVE on the site now; WhatsApp onboarding is included with every tier once your DAVE machine is installed. Chat comes with you — website, WhatsApp, your office.

Agents run the line. Humans approve.

How we build with DAVE: AI-assisted work floods a human reviewer with a review backlog code-nobody-read. AI-led work flips it — agents plan, build and test on the line, and humans set the goal, approve the plan and check only the risky changes. Final approval stays with you.

Illustration comparing AI-assisted development, where human coders flood a review backlog, with AI-led development, where agents run the plan-build-test line and humans give final approval
Fast code is not fast shipping — AI-assisted vs AI-led. Agents run the line, humans approve.

The six controls that make AI-led safe: the agent loop, tool calling, context management, checkpointing, permissions & sandboxing, and guardrails — small controls, a brighter tomorrow.

Illustrated primer titled AI Harnesses explaining six terms: agent loop, tool calling, context management, checkpointing, permissions and sandboxing, and guardrails
AI Harnesses — six must-know terms, and how an AI harness keeps agents helpful, safe and on the record.

The map every business is climbing — and the language behind it.

Two guides we swear by: the maturity ladder showing where most companies sit on agentic AI in 2026 (DAVE is built to take you past the critical threshold), and the nine concepts — agentic loops, MCP, sub-agents, gateways, harnesses — that put you ahead of 99% this year.

Illustrated maturity model L0 to L6: from AI Absent and AI Curious through AI Adopting, AI Integrated, AI Native, to Dark Factory, with market prevalence and velocity multipliers per level
The Endgame agentic engineering maturity model — from AI Absent to Dark Factory. Where is your org on this map?
Illustrated guide listing nine AI concepts for 2026: agentic loops, MCP, subagents and multi-agent systems, AI gateway, inference economics, evals, guardrails, observability and agent harness
Nine AI concepts that put you ahead of 99% in 2026 — the vocabulary DAVE is built on.

DAVE is the agent harness from concept 09: planner, memory, tools, state, guardrails and evals on your own hardware — so the loop, the tools and the output stay yours.

Anatomy of an AI Agent — a small mind, a big helper.

What actually makes an agent: the LLM is the brain — it reads, writes and reasons but knows nothing about your business yet. RAG adds the library, so it answers from your documents, notes and databases instead of guesses. MCP is the nervous system — one standard plug that carries signals between the brain and your apps. Skills are muscle memory — know-how saved once and reused, no re-explaining. Put them together and you get an AI agent: brain plus hands, that plans the steps and then does them in your tools.

Illustrated guide titled Anatomy of an AI Agent explaining five layers: LLM as the brain, RAG as brain plus library, MCP as the nervous system, Skills as muscle memory, and the AI Agent as brain plus hands
A small mind, a big helper — LLM, RAG, MCP, Skills, and the agent that puts brain and hands together.

That's DAVE in one picture. Fourteen agents share the same anatomy — our knowledge base, memories stored on your disk, MCP connections to your tools, skills tuned to your business. Nothing generic, nothing rented: the brain runs on your machine.

How AI systems evolved — and where we landed.

From 1950s rule-books (humans write every if-else) to expert systems in the 80s, machine learning in the 90s, and deep learning on GPUs in 2012. Then 2017's transformers taught models to pay attention — 2022 turned that into chat assistants you rent. The 2025 stage is the real prize: agentic AI — LLMs that plan, act, observe and reflect in a loop, talk to tools over MCP, keep short- and long-term memory, hand off between specialist agents, and wrap it all in guardrails, human-in-the-loop approval and evals.

Illustrated timeline of AI systems from the 1950s rule-based era through expert systems, machine learning, deep learning, transformers, LLMs and chat, RAG in 2023, to agentic AI systems in 2025 with orchestrator, tools, memory and human-in-the-loop
Seven decades in one map: from hand-written rules to agentic AI that plans, uses tools, remembers and collaborates.

That last stage is exactly what we built. DAVE is the 2025 layer, finished: fourteen specialist agents behind one orchestrator, working in a plan–act–observe–reflect loop with your tools over MCP, memory that lives on your disk, HITL approval on every consequential action, and every step recorded in the DAVE Ledger. Decades of AI evolution, running on your desk — not in somebody's cloud.

Join the DAVE Community

Or connect on LinkedIn ↗

We use your details only for the DAVE Community. Privacy notice

A traveller stands on a river of starlight above the clouds, between two glowing spheres marked zero and one joined by a golden thread, with floating castles and a flowered cliff below
Not your key, not your agent.
News · 15 October 2026

The harness era is here.

A short essay on where AI is going — and why we built DAVE the way we did.

Chatbots answer questions. Harnesses do the work. That one line splits the AI market in two. A chat window waits for you to type; a harness is the machinery that lets an agent act — scheduling, remembering, calling tools, checking its own output, and asking a human before anything real happens.

2026 made this obvious to everyone. DeepSeek ships agent frameworks around its models. Muse runs assistants that read, plan and execute across whole workflows. The big labs have all moved the same way: the model is the engine, but the harness is the product. If you're buying AI today and it doesn't act, remember — you're buying half a car.

Most of it, though, still runs on somebody else's cloud. Your prompts, your files, your customer data — processed on rented servers, under someone else's account, billed per seat, revocable at any time. The harness era made AI more capable. It didn't make it yours.

That's the gap DAVE was built for. DAVE is a harness in the same sense DeepSeek and Muse are — agents that act, remember, and verify — with one difference that matters: it runs on hardware you own. The ADAM Agentic Harness coordinates 14 specialist agents on your Mac Studio or minis. Long-term memory lives on your disk. The HITL Gate means nothing leaves the machine or touches money without a human approval. The DAVE Ledger hash-chains every action so history can't be quietly rewritten.

Three properties, one stack: agents that do the work like the cloud harnesses — but private, owned, and verifiable. "Not your key, not your agent" cuts both ways: a harness on someone else's cloud works for them first. A harness on your desk works for you. Permanently.

DAVE ships as a full bundle — hardware, harness, agents, security — installed in your office. See the tiers, or reserve a unit.

Pre-order

Reserve your DAVE. Pre-orders close soon.

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Tier
Estimated totalUS$4,500one-time · before delivery and taxes