Steadfast

01Purpose and status

This memorandum describes what Steadfast is, what has been built and independently verified, and what remains open. It is issued in draft because the commercial terms have not been set.

Every product, architecture and verification claim in sections 03 to 10 is drawn from the working codebase and its committed verification record, not from a plan. Where the source is a live test against a deployed environment, the memorandum says so and gives the date.

The commercial sections – market, model, route to market, team and the raise – are deliberately incomplete. Rather than fill them with plausible numbers, each unsettled figure appears as a marked slot. Section 19 lists every one of them in a single table, so the gap between this draft and a document fit to send is explicit and finite.

02Executive summary

Steadfast is a private, persistent companion for Australian men in the first twelve months after a separation. It is not a chatbot. It is a separation intelligence system: it listens, remembers, keeps facts apart from allegations, watches for risk, maintains a chronology, coaches communication under pressure, and always knows the single next move that matters.

The position in six points

1. The market is underserved by design. Separated men are a demographic that does not present, does not ask, and does not talk. The information they need exists, scattered across government sites and legal FAQs, and none of it knows their situation or remembers what they said yesterday.
2. The product is a system of record, not a conversation. Everything said becomes structured case intelligence – a live map across seven dimensions, a dated chronology, classified facts, and one Next Best Action. Value compounds with use; a generic assistant starts from zero every session.
3. Privacy is the architecture, not a policy page. Row Level Security on every table, the server holding no privileged data path, Sydney-region storage, on-device speech, and an AI gateway instructed never to retain a prompt. In this category that is the product, not a feature of it.
4. It is built and verified, not specified. All seven build phases are complete and exercised end to end against a deployed environment with real model calls – including the safety behaviour, the isolation guarantees and the professional handover pack.
5. It makes professionals more effective rather than competing with them. A client who arrives at a family lawyer organised, dated and evidenced is cheaper to serve and better served. That is the distribution channel and the credibility test at the same time.
6. The commercial case is the open work. Pricing, sizing, unit economics and the raise are unsettled. Section 19 says exactly what is missing.

The ask

Steadfast is seeking to confirm – amount at to confirm – stage and structure to to confirm – the one sentence on what the money buys. Use of funds is set out at section 17.

03The problem

When a relationship ends, everything arrives at once, and it arrives at the worst possible moment for clear thinking.

Where the children sleep tonight. Who stays in the house. What that letter from a lawyer actually means. How to answer a message that made his blood boil. Whether the thing he did last Tuesday has made his position worse. Each of these is answerable. Together, in the first weeks, they are not.

Why the existing options fail this person

The cost of the gap

The damage in the first twelve months is largely self-inflicted and largely preventable: the message sent in anger that becomes an exhibit, the arrangement agreed verbally and never recorded, the appointment attended with nothing written down, the escalation that could have waited a day. None of it requires legal knowledge to avoid. It requires someone steady in the room at the moment of the decision.

Steadfast is built to be in the room at that moment.

04The product

A single private companion that turns an unstructured account of a separation into an organised, current, defensible picture – and then tells the user the one thing worth doing next.

The core loop is deliberately narrow: chaos → clarity → priority → action → continuity.

Don’t Send This Yet, in practice

A fictional exchange, written for this document. No real person’s words appear anywhere in this memorandum.

The system also names why: threats of legal action used as pressure, characterising the other parent to the other parent, and putting the children inside the dispute. It does not lecture, and it does not send anything – the user does.

The rest of the surface

• Timeline – a dated chronology built from what he says, each entry proposed for him to confirm, edit or ignore, and worded “user reports…” until it is established.
• What Just Happened – a mode for the hour after an incident, when he needs to get it down before he loses the detail.
• Professional Prep – an eleven-section pack for a lawyer or mediator appointment, keeping facts, reports, assumptions and unknowns visibly apart, with his questions framed as questions rather than conclusions. Print-friendly.
• Safety – a dedicated layer, not a prompt instruction. Where the situation is urgent, coaching stops and crisis contacts surface.
• Support near him – a state-aware directory of crisis, mental health, family violence, legal aid, community legal, family relationships, parenting, child support and court services. Thirty-seven entries across the eight states and territories and nationally, readable without an account, tap-to-call, and carried into the companion’s own context so it can name the right service and the right number in one sentence.
• Voice – dictation transcribed on his own device. The audio never leaves it.

05How it actually works

The difference between this and a well-prompted assistant is that the conversation is not the product. The conversation is how the product collects its inputs.

Two brains, one experience

Each turn runs two separate functions against the same message. The conversation is streamed, warm and human. The case assessor runs behind it, structured and validated, extracting memories, chronology entries, priority changes and safety signals. They may share a model. They never share a prompt, because the qualities that make a good reply are not the qualities that make a reliable extraction.

The AI proposes; the application decides

No model output is trusted as an instruction. Every structured result is validated against a schema; a failure gets one correction attempt and is then discarded rather than applied. What lands in the case record and what becomes the Next Best Action are decided by ordinary deterministic code. The model is a very good reader of an unstructured account. It is not the system of record.

Facts are classified, not assumed

Facts, user reports, allegations, assumptions, professional findings and unknowns are six distinct classifications, enforced at the schema and database level rather than in wording. An accusation can never quietly become a fact through repetition. This is what makes the professional handover pack usable by a lawyer, and it is the single hardest thing for a general assistant to retrofit.

The context has a hard ceiling

Seven deterministic layers – profile, current situation, relevant memories, significant chronology, priorities and next action, recent conversation, and reviewed Australian knowledge – are assembled to a character budget per layer and a total cap of 22,000 characters, roughly 5,500 tokens. The prompt cannot grow unbounded no matter how long the case runs. That is a cost control, a latency control and a prompt-injection ceiling in one decision.

06Product principles

Eight rules treated as architectural requirements rather than aspirations. Where an implementation choice threatens one, the principle wins.

1. Children before winning. No adversarial coaching for its own sake.
2. Safety before strategy. Immediate safety concerns override ordinary coaching, through a dedicated layer rather than a prompt suggestion.
3. Responsibility without judgement. The user is not automatically right; the former partner is not automatically wrong.
4. Action before information. One next best action, never a ten-point list.
5. Personalised before generic. Advice sharpens as the structured case grows.
6. Professional bridge, not professional replacement. It makes people dramatically better prepared to use professionals.
7. Facts are sacred. Six classifications, enforced in the schema.
8. Unknown is a valid answer. Every map dimension starts unknown. No manufactured certainty.

07Technology and architecture

A small, modern, low-operational-burden stack chosen so that a team of this size can run it, and so that no single supplier can hold the product hostage.

Three decisions worth an investor’s attention

08Privacy, security and residency

This product holds what a man tells nobody else, in the weeks he is least able to protect himself. Privacy is not a compliance exercise here. It is the reason he opens it at all.

Regulatory posture

The product handles sensitive information under the Australian Privacy Principles, and the design decisions above were made to that standard. A formal privacy impact assessment, a published privacy policy reviewed by counsel, and a decision on notifiable data breach procedures are outstanding: to confirm – legal review status and entity.

09Where the line is

The fastest way to destroy this product is to let it drift into practising law, medicine or crisis care. The boundary is enforced in the system, not written on a page.

Steadfast is support and preparation. It is not a law firm, a psychologist, a mediator, a family dispute resolution practitioner, a financial adviser, a crisis service, or a predictor of court outcomes. It never presents as one, and where something needs a professional it says so plainly.

The safety layer

Three layers, in order, ahead of anything else:

1. A lexical pre-screen that runs before any model call at all.
2. A dedicated structured safety assessor, separate from the case assessor. Where the pre-screen flags, it now runs before the reply streams and its judgement shapes what the user reads, rather than arriving after he has already read something. Routine turns keep the cheaper path behind the reply.
3. Crisis contacts held in an updatable knowledge layer rather than compiled into the application, so they can be corrected without a deployment.

Live testing against the deployed system confirms the behaviour: on disclosure of suicidal ideation the assessment returns urgent, coaching stops, emergency and crisis contacts surface, and – importantly – the system does not claim that anyone has been contacted on the user’s behalf.

What it will not help with

The refusals are written into the prompt rather than left to the model’s judgement. It will not help a user breach an order, hide an asset, move a child without agreement, record or track someone without knowing the law, or use the children as leverage. It speaks from the Australian system only, names where the states differ rather than generalising, and sends him to his own state’s service instead of guessing.

The ordering principle above all of it: comfort first, and when a real person is what the moment needs, say who and give the number.

10Build status and evidence

All seven build phases are complete. The distinction that matters is between what has been written and what has been exercised against a deployed environment with a real model behind it.

What live testing found that code review could not

The project’s verification record is unusual in that it documents its own failures. Testing over the API with a directly obtained token passed cleanly while three defects sat in the deployed product, invisible to it: the browser bundle pointed at the wrong database project, so anyone signing in through a browser was rejected; the security policy blocked the application’s own start-up script; and the AI was writing to the user in the third person, in the most prominent sentence on the screen. A separate defect doubled every reply in the transcript and had been present since the first commit.

All four are fixed and regression-tested. They are included here because a memorandum that reports only successes tells an investor nothing about how the team finds problems. This one found them by using the product in a browser, at two screen sizes, as a user – and then wrote down what it had been wrong about.

Deliberate boundaries in the current build

• The short horizon shows at most three items per band. A man in the first weeks cannot act on twenty, and reads a long list as one more way he is failing. A product decision, not a technical cap.
• Burst rate limiting is per-instance in memory; the durable control is the database-counted hourly quota. A distributed limiter is post-launch work.
• The knowledge layer is seeded with reviewed entries and the professional review workflow is manual by design at this stage.
• The brand identity is part-landed. A drafted mark – two figures, one with a hand on the other’s shoulder – now carries the favicon, the home-screen icons and the wordmark across the marketing pages and the app. The wider identity pass is still outstanding, and branding flows from design tokens, so it can be completed without touching components.

11Market

The qualitative case is strong and the quantitative case is not yet built. This section sets out the argument and the method; the arithmetic is outstanding.

The argument

Separation is a high-volume, recurring, emotionally acute life event with a well-defined twelve-month window of maximum need. The initial user is a separated Australian father aged roughly thirty to fifty-five, often the one who moved out, usually navigating the system for the first time, and characteristically unwilling to ask for help from a person. That last trait is the reason the segment is underserved, and the reason a private, always-available, non-judging system reaches people that services staffed by humans do not.

The adjacent expansions are obvious and deliberately deferred: separated mothers, the second and subsequent years, grandparents and extended family, and the professional-facing side of the same case data.

Sizing – outstanding

12Business model

No pricing is set and no billing exists. What is settled is the shape of the model and the cost floor beneath it.

Revenue – outstanding

Costs – partly known

13Route to market

This user does not search for help and does not respond to being marketed to as someone who needs it. He is reached at the point where he is already dealing with the separation.

The credibility test

The stated professional bar is whether an experienced family law practitioner would recognise that a client arriving after using this system is substantially better organised and less likely to have damaged his own position. That is a harder test than user satisfaction, it is the test the referral channel actually applies, and it is the one the product is being measured against.

14Competitive position

The honest framing: the underlying model is a commodity anyone can rent. Everything defensible sits in what surrounds it.

What is actually defensible

1. The accumulated case. Six months of classified, dated, corrected case intelligence does not port to a competitor. Switching cost is real and grows without any lock-in mechanic.
2. The classification discipline. Keeping facts, reports, allegations, assumptions, professional findings and unknowns apart at the schema level is the hardest thing here to copy, because it must be designed in rather than prompted on.
3. The professional relationship. Practitioner trust is earned slowly and is not purchasable. It is also the channel.
4. The Australian specificity. Jurisdiction, terminology, services and crisis contacts sit in a reviewed knowledge layer, and it is now populated: thirty-seven support entries across every state and territory, each recorded with how its number was checked and against which source. A global product cannot be locally right by default, and the work of becoming locally right is unglamorous, ongoing and exactly the kind a fast follower skips.
5. The restraint. The commercial temptation is to make it say more, promise more, take a side. The competitor who yields to that produces something that a family lawyer will tell clients to stop using.

What is not defensible: the model, the stack, or the interface. Any of it can be rebuilt. Assume a fast follower and compete on the four points above.

15Team and governance

Outstanding in full. This section is the one an investor reads first and it is currently empty.

16Risks and mitigations

17The raise

Terms are not settled. The structure below is the shape the section will take.

Use of funds

The allocation below reflects what the project actually needs next rather than a conventional split. Percentages: to confirm.

1. Clinical and legal validation. Formal safety review, family law advisory, privacy impact assessment and insurance. This is the gating item for launch, not a compliance afterthought.
2. Closing the commercial unknowns. Pricing research, a paid pilot through the professional channel, and measured unit economics from live gateway data.
3. Launch-readiness engineering. Re-running isolation verification across attachments, a distributed rate limiter, billing, and the operational tooling a paid product needs.
4. Channel development. Practitioner partnerships, which are slow, relationship-led and the main determinant of reachable market.
5. Brand. The mark is drafted and in the product; the identity beneath it is not finished.

18Roadmap

Sequenced by what has to be true before the next thing is safe to do, rather than by calendar. Dates: to confirm.

19Outstanding inputs

Every unsettled item in this memorandum, in one place. This is the distance between a draft and a document that can be sent.

20Appendix

A · Verification record

Exercised against the deployed system with a genuine session, not inferred from source. Dates as recorded in the project’s documentation.

B · Glossary

C · Sources

Every product, architecture, security and verification claim in this memorandum is drawn from the Steadfast codebase and its committed documentation – the architecture, product principles, security and status records – and from the dated live verification runs recorded there. Nothing in sections 03 to 10 is aspirational. Commercial claims are marked outstanding wherever they are not yet settled.

The photography is generated concept imagery, made for this document with an image model and labelled as such on every plate. No frame is a photograph of a real user, a real client or a real member of the team, and none should be reproduced as though it were. The scenes are chosen to carry the subject honestly – no faces of children, nobody performing distress for a camera – and they illustrate the argument rather than evidencing it.