A small software company building a private AI companion that runs on your own machine.
Starchild is a desktop application for macOS, Windows and Linux. It helps people describe the life they actually want, maps that answer onto a vision tree, and breaks the distance between here and there into small, specific quests. It is free, it is open source, and it is built so that the most personal thing a person can type — what they would do if nothing were in the way — never becomes someone else's training data.
The product is a Tauri and Rust application with a React front end, shipping today as version 0.2.0 on all three desktop platforms. Every conversation is encrypted on the user's device and decrypted only inside hardware-verified trusted execution environments, so no operator in the chain — ourselves included — can read it. Conversation state lives locally in the user's own database file, not in our infrastructure.
That architecture is the whole thesis. A companion that asks people the questions they have been avoiding is only useful if they can be honest with it, and honesty requires a guarantee stronger than a promise in a privacy policy. We would rather carry the engineering cost of attestation than ask anyone to trust us.
Starchild is built by Kilián Valdman, working with Owen Barnes, whom he met on the hackathon circuit in Cannes and has been building alongside since. The project began during The Synthesis hackathon and has continued past it. Development happens in the open — the full stack, from the Rust core to this website, is public, and contributions are welcome. The origin story has the longer version.
Starchild is operated by Kilián Valdman, a sole trader registered in the Czech Republic, trading since 2023.
Full statutory details are on the legal page, and anything else reaches us at contact.