Idea Foundry is the private workbench for ideas. Capture anything in seconds, decide what deserves attention, develop it with evidence, then build, license, archive, or pass it on — without losing a single step.
The core workbench runs today. The wider idea economy is being built in public.
The capture promise
Your best ideas rarely arrive neatly typed. Save the thought before its context disappears; every format enters the same durable inbox, ready when you are.
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Built over time
Capture, scoring, organization, research, planning, and provenance already work locally. Each release connects more of the journey around a single source of truth.
Lifecycle tracking, weighted scoring, Kanban, 3D topology, rich editing, templates, version history, exports, and backups established the workbench.
Email intake, external submission keys, threaded notes, reminders, and local HTTPS widened the path from a passing thought into durable work.
SQLCipher encryption, typing and voice locks, recoverable drafts, multiple boards and scoring systems, app-owned agents, scoped tokens, and note imports.
Planning views, fast command-palette search, infinite idea browsing, mobile pairing, file storage, activity provenance, and local OCR expanded daily use.
Live local files, favourites and custom icons, filesystem AI jobs, and revision-safe image, video, audio, PDF, and HTML editing turn research into an active workspace.
The workbench, notes, knowledge base, and planning tools run today. Read the complete changelog →
The lifecycle
Capture it, score it your way, triage it, and develop it with research and experiments. Then decide: build, license, archive, or preserve it for a successor.
Change your mind as often as the work demands. The history stays intact.
Platform parts
Ideas do not live alone. Notes, evidence, plans, relationships, rights, and collaborators stay connected to the idea they serve — shared deliberately, never by default.
The core: capture, triage, develop, score, and plan every idea in one place.
Threaded writing in service of ideas, attached where the thinking happens.
Local files, media studios, AI jobs, and research connected to ideas as evidence.
Planning and optional backlog tools for the ideas that graduate to being built.
Your own contacts and relationships, tied to the ideas they touch.
The legal side: provenance, protection, licensing, and defensive publication.
A curated public face for the ideas you decide are up for grabs.
Succession for ideas and research — they outlive you, on your terms.
Trust & provenance
Privacy, provenance, control, and portability are requirements — not upgrades.
The database is encrypted at rest with keys you set. Your machine is the vault and the source of truth — nothing leaves without an explicit action, and anything that does is encrypted to your keys first.
Who had what idea, when. Version history, activity log, authorship signals — the story of an idea is reconstructable end to end.
Agents are local to the app and act only through scoped, revocable tokens. Anything outward-facing — email, publish, sell — requires your approval.
Everything exports to open formats at any time. Required for legacy, honest everywhere else.
Working the ideas
No third-party LLM ever sees your ideas. The agent lives in the app with the whole context, and helps organically: shaping, scoring, organizing, enriching — including web search that discloses nothing of yours.
In the IP platform it becomes an expert IP and corporate lawyer. Every contribution is attributed and logged; human and agent authorship are always distinguishable.
Add anything — papers, references, your own research — and connect it to ideas as support, prior art, contradiction, or inspiration.
An idea with a KB trail is a developed idea. The trail is part of its provenance, and part of its sale value.
Beyond the vault
You decide an idea is up for grabs. Buyers and bidders meet it on a separate, company-hosted webapp that only ever holds the curated face you chose to publish — pitch and selected artifacts. The vault stays private.
The roadmap covers valuation, NDAs, escrow, sales, and royalties.
Legacy here means succession, not sentiment: your ideas and research are an intellectual estate. Because everything carries provenance, what you pass on is not a folder of files but an attributed, dated body of thought — who conceived what, when, and the evidence behind it. Heirs inherit the proof along with the work.
Designate who receives what: everything to one successor, or partitioned — these ideas to one person, that research to another — each partition encrypted with its own key. The encrypted database is delivered by the noder; the key travels by a separate, untraceable channel. Whoever holds both holds the rights.
Defensive publication as prior art is in scope, through the IP platform.
Ecosystem
The services around Idea Foundry capture, carry, and back up your work. They move ciphertext; your local instance keeps the readable data and the keys.
Satellites capture, relay, and back up — always ciphertext, never plaintext.
Non-goals
Not a social network. Sharing is deliberate, scoped, and per idea.
Not a cloud service. No central server ever holds plaintext.
Run it yourself
Install on your Mac, or run it on a private server behind access controls you choose. Your machine remains the vault; open exports keep your work portable.