Carabase was founded in Brisbane, Australia. It grew out of a simple frustration: the AI tools getting dramatically smarter still arrive as strangers to the life and work they are meant to help with.
What we're building
A personal context engine: an open-source Host that keeps the knowledge substrate on hardware you control, native Mac and iPhone experiences, and a neutral context layer for the AI assistants you choose.
It is not a note-taking app, a chatbot or a proprietary memory silo. It is the substrate underneath those experiences: persistent, temporal, queryable context with provenance attached.
The full argument is in the manifesto.
The path here
The path to Carabase runs through a decade of building applied AI and context infrastructure: Max Kelsen, whose consulting and managed-services business was sold to Bain & Company in 2023; SAVI Surgical, an AI-powered surgical instrument-management company later sold to The Riverside Company; and Propel Health AI, a governed context layer for clinical AI.
Carabase is the same thesis brought down to the individual: models become useful when the surrounding context becomes durable infrastructure.
Principles
Inspectable where it matters. The Host—the part where your data lives—is open source and will remain so. You should be able to inspect the security boundary rather than take a marketing claim on faith.
Agent-neutral. Carabase supplies context to the tools you choose. The model is replaceable; the accumulated understanding of your life is not.
Corrections should compound. When you correct Carabase, that signal should improve future retrieval rather than disappear into a chat transcript.
Convenience is the business model. Paid value will come from installation, native experiences, managed services and support—not from locking personal context inside a proprietary format.
Getting in touch
Email hello@carabase.ai. Private-alpha applications are at the bottom of the homepage.
For security reports, see /.well-known/security.txt.