My AI swarm is from 2026.
My collaboration is still from 1995.

Where CELLO started

In late 2025, we were brought in to give a wealth management firm in East Africa something we thought would transform their work: a personal AI assistant for every person on the team. We went in confident. These were smart people running a serious operation, and we believed putting the right AI Assistants in their hands would move the needle significantly.

What we found stopped us cold. Individual performance wasn't the bottleneck — it was already strong. The problem was coordination. Getting the right information from one desk to the next without it drifting, without anything being quietly altered in the gap, without the friction multiplying every time the work crossed a boundary. Personal AI assistants would have helped at the edges. But they wouldn't have moved the needle much — because the needle was stuck in the space between people, not within them.

The coordination overhead had a second cost that was harder to see. The work moved fast — client requests, competing priorities, decisions made on the fly and picked up again an hour later. When someone's attention shifted to something more urgent, the original thread didn't disappear. It just lost its owner. Not because anyone was careless — because there was nowhere reliable for it to land. “Late into the evening, the team was exhausted — not because the work was hard, but because the handoffs had consumed everything.”

Client accounts, balances, and transactions were properly tracked — the firm had the solutions for that. But like many firms, all the other stuff was captured in emails, meeting notes, WhatsApp messages, or personal face-to-face conversations. Who had agreed to do what for whom, which directive had come from which desk, what had been decided in a conversation and hadn't made it into any system yet — the informal layer that shaped how the tracked work actually got done. Smarter AI assistants on each end would have helped a bit. But to really move the needle, we had to solve the coordination and collaboration bottleneck — and that meant building it into the protocol from the start.

The deeper problem

Step back far enough and this stops being about work. “It's about trust — and what its absence costs us. Coordination breaks down without it. Collaboration becomes impossible.” Nearly every friction in human life is the price of not being able to take someone at their word. We spent centuries building machinery to lower that price: contracts, courts, registries, identity systems, accountability mechanisms. The scaffolding stops in a lot of places, and where it stops, the friction turns punishing.

Agents inherit every one of those gaps — and they inherit them without the centuries of workarounds humans built to survive them. No reputation that follows you. No body language to read. No institution to appeal to. No social fabric to fall back on. What was friction for humans becomes a wall for agents. They can be brilliant on either end and still have no shared record, no verifiable identity, “no way to negotiate trust without surrendering privacy to someone in the middle.” That's the problem CELLO solves — not at the application layer, but at the protocol layer, where it belongs.

What we believe

Imagine your phone company saying: sure, you can have a number — but we reserve the right to record every call. You'd switch providers in an hour. Somehow, with our data, we agreed to exactly that.

CELLO doesn't work that way. Private by architecture, not by promise. Your keys are yours. Your content is never seen. The proof of what happened doesn't require trusting us to hold it.

The big platforms will always want your data — that's the deal, whether it's stated or not. “CELLO is built on a different premise: that your data belongs to you, and no one should have to trade privacy for the ability to communicate and collaborate.” Private by architecture, not by promise. Individual autonomy, data sovereignty, and privacy aren't features we added. They're the reason CELLO exists.

What CELLO is

CELLO is the protocol layer the agent internet is missing. Three primitives:

A verifiable identity that belongs to you, not a platform — generated on your device, anchored across a federated network of independent nodes, revocable by no one but you.

A secure channel any two agents can use to reach each other directly — end-to-end encrypted, peer-to-peer, with no central transcript stored anywhere.

And consent threaded through everything — explicit, revocable, yours. You decide what trust signals to share. You decide who can reach your agent. You decide what gets proved and to whom. Install it once. Every agent you run gets all three.

Why this matters now

AI is growing more ubiquitous by the day. Within a few years, personal agents will migrate from your computer to your devices — and sooner than that, they'll be layered on top of your laptop, built deeper into your OS, woven into everything you do. More and more of your interactions will be mediated by AI agents. You'll negotiate services, make decisions, and move through the world through them.

Local AI models will solve local inference — your data stays on your device, your queries never leave. But the moment your agent needs to reach another agent, a different device, a different organization, the privacy problem doesn't disappear. It moves to the channel. Who owns what passes between them?

CELLO is our attempt to head off a future where you trade your data sovereignty and privacy for the right to communicate and collaborate.