About Protostar AI
Privacy with AI, built by people who ship regulated products.
Protostar AI, LLC is a privacy-first AI software company that lets regulated teams use the best available AI models on their most sensitive data without ever handing that data over. Founded in 2023 by Nick Soro and based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, it builds and operates its own products on the same platform it offers to customers.
What Protostar AI does
Protostar Secure AI Gateway
A gateway that sits between your application and AI models. Every request is classified by sensitivity, detected identifiers are replaced before anything leaves your boundary, regulated data is pinned to a self-hosted model with no internet route, and the answer is rebuilt inside your walls with a tamper-evident audit record. The outcome: frontier-quality AI on data you are obligated to protect, with a record of exactly what happened to it.
Protostar document cleaner
A plugin for Claude Code that strips tracking marks and metadata from documents and generated text: invisible characters, document properties, image metadata. It runs locally and deterministically, so cleaned records can be filed as records. The outcome: documents that carry your content and nothing else.
Gateway plugin for AI assistants
A plugin that lets an AI assistant perform tasks through your own Protostar gateway, so each call it makes is classified, anonymized where it must be, audited, and cleaned. It protects the model call the gateway makes on your behalf and says so plainly; it is not a way to make a public assistant private after the fact.
What makes Protostar AI different
Regulated data never leaves your boundary, by architecture
The most sensitive class of data is served only by a self-hosted model on a network with no outbound route. This is enforced by the network design and pinned by automated tests, not by a policy that asks a model to behave.
Anonymize before egress, restore inside
When lower-sensitivity content is sent to an external model, detected personal identifiers are replaced with realistic stand-ins first. The real values stay in a request-scoped vault inside the boundary and are restored into the answer after it returns. The external model never receives them.
A tamper-evident record of every request
Each request produces a hash-chained audit record: tenant, data class, routing tier, whether the request left the boundary, counts of what was masked. Any modification, reordering, or deletion of the chain is detectable. The record contains no message content.
Tracking marks are removed, and the limits are stated
Invisible characters and file metadata are stripped reliably and verifiably. Statistical text watermarks are disrupted on a best-effort basis, and Protostar measures and reports that efficacy rather than promising removal. We would rather tell you the real number than sell you a guarantee.
Built by a regulated-industry operator
The founder spent more than twenty years bringing FDA-regulated medical devices to market and runs IEC 62304 as a discipline inside Protostar, not as a badge to chase. The platform is proven first on the studio’s own regulated ventures before it is offered to anyone else.
Who uses Protostar AI
- Today: the Protostar studio’s own ventures, including SequenceQMS, a quality management system for medical-device companies, which sends its documents through the gateway.
- Designed for: healthcare and medical-device teams handling protected health information under a Business Associate Agreement; financial and trading teams with confidential client data; any team that needs frontier models on data it is not allowed to expose.
- Region: United States only. Protostar does not operate in the European Union today.
The team behind Protostar AI
Nick Soro, founder
Nick Soro is a hands-on medical-device executive with more than twenty years of bringing FDA-regulated products from concept to market. He was Chief Operating Officer of Sensus Healthcare (NASDAQ: SRTS) from 2020 to 2023, where the business delivered six consecutive quarters of record revenue and growth, and before that directed regulatory affairs and quality assurance at Sensus and at Demetech. He founded Protostar AI in 2023 alongside Sequence Group, a medical-device design and quality firm, and Limit Outfitter, an outdoor brand. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Applied Economics and works across ISO 13485, IEC 62304, IEC 60601, and 21 CFR Part 820 and Part 11.
Origin. Protostar AI started from a practical problem inside Nick’s other companies: regulated teams wanted the productivity of frontier AI models but could not put protected health information or confidential client data into them. Rather than choose between capability and privacy, he built a platform that anonymizes data before it leaves and keeps the most sensitive data on models that never touch the internet. Protostar’s software and this site are designed and built by Nick Soro.
Team. Founder-led, with engineering and review capacity added per project.
How Protostar AI works with customers
- Contact: the contact form or hello@protostarai.com. We reply from a real inbox, usually within two business days.
- Onboarding: a written agreement per tenant sets the scope and the terms. For any protected health information, a Business Associate Agreement is signed before data flows. Your tenant is then provisioned with API keys, and your application connects through an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, so existing integrations change little.
- Operation: regulated workloads stay on the self-hosted tier; other workloads are routed by policy that you set per data class. Usage and audit are visible to you in the console.
- Who you work with: the founder, directly, plus the engineers on your project.
Key facts
| Company name | Protostar AI, LLC |
|---|---|
| Type | Privately held AI software company (limited liability company) |
| Founded | 2023 |
| Founder | Nick Soro |
| Headquarters | Fort Lauderdale, Florida, United States |
| Website | https://protostarai.com |
| Core offering | Protostar Secure AI Gateway: a privacy layer for using frontier AI models on sensitive and regulated data |
| Also offers | Protostar document cleaner plugin; gateway plugin for AI assistants; integration into SequenceQMS |
| Pricing | Quoted per tenant; no self-serve plans today |
| Contract terms | Written agreement per tenant; Business Associate Agreement required before any protected health information |
| Standards posture | Designed to HIPAA, SOC 2, and IEC 62304 controls; not certified or audited |
| Communication | Contact form or hello@protostarai.com; reply usually within two business days |
| Customers served | The Protostar studio's own ventures (SequenceQMS, Limit Outfitter, GolfTeeSniper, ZeroPicks, SigmaEdge); external customer names are not published |
| Region | United States only |
| Social | Founder on LinkedIn, nicksoro.com |
Frequently asked questions
Is my data used to train models?
No. Content sent through the gateway is processed in memory for the duration of a request and is never stored, logged, or used to train or improve any model.
Does regulated data ever leave my boundary?
No. Content classified as regulated is served only by a self-hosted model with no internet route. That rule is enforced by the network design and pinned by automated tests; declaring content as regulated is the supported control for any workload where detection alone should not be trusted.
Is Protostar HIPAA certified?
No, and no vendor can be: HIPAA has no certification program. Protostar is designed to HIPAA and SOC 2 controls, has not been audited or certified against any standard, and signs a Business Associate Agreement before processing protected health information.
Where does Protostar run?
In the United States, on Amazon Web Services, inside a private network with no internet gateway, or inside your own boundary for the self-hosted tier. Protostar does not operate in the European Union today.
More questions are answered on the FAQ page.