A sovereign AI platform for organisations that need the benefit of AI without sending their data to anyone else's cloud.
Built in Vienna, deployed on your hardware, supported by the firm that has been delivering enterprise software to banks, ministries and Fortune Global 500 companies since 1998. Awarded twice gold at the international BEA World Festival 2024.
The questions are predictable. Aethos lets your CIO give the answer that closes the conversation.
But without your conversations leaving the building, without per-user metering, and without depending on a single foreign vendor whose pricing or terms could change next quarter.
Every question asked, every answer given, every document retrieved — with timestamp, user identity and source — written to a signed, append-only audit log. Exportable to your SIEM.
Start with the one module that solves your most urgent constraint. Add the rest when the business case is proven. One licence at a time, on your timetable, not the vendor's.
Sovereign AI is no longer an IT preference. It has become a board-level liability question, a regulatory deadline and a competitive advantage — at the same time.
The EU AI Act, the NIS2 directive, and the next wave of GDPR enforcement have turned where the AI runs from a technical detail into a board-level liability. Your auditors will start asking. Your General Counsel already is.
Sending your conversations, your documents and your customer data to a hyperscaler places them on infrastructure you do not control, under terms you cannot fully audit, in jurisdictions outside the EU's direct reach. The risk is no longer abstract.
The organisations that move first to a sovereign AI posture turn a regulatory burden into a competitive advantage. Their customers will trust them more. Their auditors will spend less time on AI questions. Their teams will move faster, not slower.
The answer "just don't use AI" is no longer commercial.
Aethos is a suite of five capabilities. They share one platform, one identity layer, one audit log. Each one is described below by the outcome it produces — not the technology behind it.
Your people stop searching documents and start asking them. Answers arrive with the source attached. A user only sees material they were already allowed to read — the permissions from SharePoint, Confluence, the file share and the database are inherited automatically.
Your developers ship more software, more safely, with a full written record of what AI generated, what a human reviewed and what was deployed. The output is yours; the audit trail is yours; the bottleneck shrinks.
Customer calls, internal voice notes, multilingual support — recognised, transcribed and spoken back, all on hardware you own. Not a second of audio leaves the building. No third party hears your customer's complaint or your CFO's dictation.
Branded digital presenters that speak, listen and react in any language — live on stage, in a reception kiosk, on a training portal. The same craft was recognised with two gold medals at the international BEA World Festival 2024.
Training rooms, virtual exhibitions, branded showrooms and live event scenes — built on the same engine that powers AAA games and Hollywood productions. Run on a headset, on a desktop, or streamed to a browser.
We will not show you fabricated customer quotes. The evidence lives in three places: an independent international jury, a list of organisations that have trusted STK Engineering with enterprise software since 1998, and a firm that has been operating since before this AI category existed.
Aethos is sold the way an asset is sold — paid for once, depreciated over time, owned at the end. Not the way a subscription is sold.
A single fee for the licence and an annual support contract. No per-user charges. No per-token charges. No surprise cloud bills at the end of the quarter when adoption surged.
A typical departmental deployment costs less in year three than a single year of an equivalent SaaS subscription — and you still own and run the system in year five. The maths rewards organisations that intend to keep using AI.
On termination of support you retain a perpetual right to keep running the last delivered version, with full access to your data, weights and audit log. No kill-switch. No deactivation. No lock-in.
| Public-cloud AI | Aethos | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | Vendor's cloud | Your data centre |
| Data residency | Vendor's choice | Your choice |
| Commercial model | Per-user / per-token subscription | One-time perpetual licence + annual support |
| What you own at year five | Nothing | The system, the data, the audit log |
| Exit cost | Data export & re-platforming | Keep running. No termination event. |
| Who answers when production breaks | A vendor support queue | STK Engineering staff. Direct line. |
No multi-year master agreement on day one. Every stage is fixed in scope, fixed in price and ends with a written decision point. Either side can stop without penalty if the success criteria were not met.
One day in your office with our architecture lead. We map your sources, your identity systems, your compliance constraints and the use cases that matter most. You leave with a clear, costed plan.
A working installation in a sandbox you control, connected to a representative slice of your real data, configured to two modules of your choice. Weekly checkpoints with the architecture lead. The PoC fee credits against the licence if you proceed.
A real deployment under a real SLA, with monitoring and an on-call rotation. Success criteria are agreed in advance. If they are met, the pilot scales to full roll-out. If they are not, the engagement ends without further commitment.
Choose the operating arrangement that fits your team. Self-operate under the support contract. Co-managed with our on-call alongside yours. STK-operated as a managed service running inside your perimeter. The stack stays customer-hosted in every mode.
Every engagement proves itself before it scales.
The Architecture Workshop is the cleanest way to find out whether Aethos fits your organisation. One day, on-site, with Kristijan Stojanović — founder of STK Engineering — and the architecture lead assigned to your sector.
We come prepared. We listen first. We leave you with a written sizing and integration plan, signed by both parties, that you can take into a board meeting without further work.
It is a working conversation, not a sales call.