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Lausanne, Switzerland

Rue de Bourg 27, 1003 Lausanne. Swiss law, Swiss data protection, engineers on the support line.

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Private AI and research data platforms for universities and research labs

Private AI for researchers, research data tools and collaboration on your own servers or on dedicated machines in Switzerland, operated for universities, schools and labs.

Talk to our teamBook a 30-minute briefing

Deployment
Your servers or GPUs, Pilae Cloud, or hybrid
Private AI
Open models on your hardware, prompts stay there
Identity
Keycloak connected to your campus login
Research data
Access per project, exports in open formats

What a research institution needs from its IT

Researchers want new tools this term. The research office wants data kept where the funder, the ethics committee and the data protection officer said it would be. Central IT is asked to deliver both with the staff it has.

Private AI for researchers

Chat, summarise papers and query documents with open models on your own GPUs. Interview transcripts and unpublished results stay inside.

Research databases without code

Teams build structured datasets in NocoDB or Directus on Postgres, with access per project and exports in open formats.

On the hardware you already own

We run the apps on your servers and your GPU nodes, or on dedicated GPU machines in the Pilae Cloud region you choose when the lab has none.

Campus login

Keycloak connects to your institution's identity provider, so staff, students and guest researchers sign in with the account they already have.

Backups for irreplaceable data

Daily encrypted backups offsite in the country you choose, with a restore test every month recorded in the console.

Central IT stays in control

The Pilae Agent plans each update and waits for approval from your IT team. Every change is recorded in the audit log.

Private AI for researchers

Researchers already use AI to read papers, draft grant text and explore data. The material they would paste in, such as interview transcripts, patient-derived data or unpublished results, is often bound by an ethics approval or a data agreement. We run private AI with open models on your hardware and Open WebUI or LibreChat as the interface, so the material stays where the approval says it must.

Research data platforms

Labs keep structured data in spreadsheets that one person understands. NocoDB and Directus give them a database with forms, views and an API, on Postgres you own. Questionnaires run on LimeSurvey, so responses are stored on your servers rather than a survey vendor’s, and analysis code and notebooks live in GitLab. Files and shared folders move to Nextcloud. Everything runs on your servers or on dedicated machines in Switzerland.

Central IT keeps control

Self-hosted tools spread across a campus one lab at a time, each on a server someone set up and nobody updates. We bring them under one operation. The Pilae Agent plans each update and waits for your IT team to approve it, monitoring watches every app, and the data residency page explains how each location is named in the contract.

Talk to us

Contact us to scope a pilot.

How we start with an institution

  1. Scoping with IT and research

    We meet central IT, the research office and a pilot group, and list the apps, the data classes and the hardware already in place.

  2. Pilot for one faculty or lab

    A fixed-price onboarding for a first group, such as private AI for one faculty or a research database for one lab.

  3. Campus-wide rollout

    We connect Keycloak or Entra ID, open the apps to more groups and migrate data off the SaaS tools being left.

  4. Managed operations

    Updates run in windows your IT team agrees, around the academic calendar. Monitoring alerts reach Pilae engineers around the clock.

What your contract includes

Data location
Named per app: your servers, Switzerland, or an EU region you choose.
Academic calendar
Change freezes around exam periods and term starts you list.
Availability
99.9% monthly availability commitment with service credits, in every plan.
Data processing
A data processing agreement under the nLPD and, where it applies, the GDPR, with sub-processors disclosed to you in the signed agreement.
Exit
A full export of data and configuration in open formats, and help moving to another operator or back to your own team.

The apps behind it

Open WebUI

A chat interface over models you host, so prompts and the documents people paste into them never leave your network.

Replaces ChatGPT Team, Microsoft Copilot

LibreChat

One chat interface over every model your organisation allows, local or hosted, with the keys, the history and the choice of provider held on your side.

Replaces ChatGPT Team, Poe

NocoDB

A spreadsheet interface over a real database, so a department can build the tool it needs without anyone provisioning a new system.

Replaces Airtable

Directus

A data platform and headless CMS over your own SQL database. Editors get an admin app, and every table gets an API.

Replaces Contentful, Airtable

PostgreSQL

Managed PostgreSQL on dedicated machines in Switzerland, the EU or your own datacentre, with backups you can restore to the minute and upgrades you approve.

Replaces Amazon RDS, Azure Database for PostgreSQL

LimeSurvey

Surveys and research questionnaires with personal invitations and anonymised responses, run in Switzerland, the EU or your own datacentre so the answers stay in your jurisdiction.

Replaces SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics, Microsoft Forms

GitLab

Git repositories, merge requests, CI/CD pipelines and registries in one application, run on your own hardware or in Swiss and EU regions, with runners on machines you place.

Replaces GitHub Enterprise Cloud, GitLab.com, Azure DevOps

Nextcloud

Files, calendars and shared documents for the whole organisation, on storage you can point at in a room you control.

Replaces Google Drive, Dropbox, SharePoint

Keycloak

Single sign-on for everything else you run, with your own directory as the source of truth and no per-seat bill between you and it.

Replaces Okta, Microsoft Entra ID

Questions

Can researchers use AI on unpublished data and interview transcripts?

Yes, when the model runs inside your environment. Open WebUI or LibreChat runs on your servers or GPU nodes with open models hosted there. Prompts, uploaded files and answers stay inside, and no prompt goes to a public AI service unless you connect one.

Can you run on our existing GPU cluster?

Yes. We deploy model serving and the chat interface on GPU servers you already own, with your research computing team deciding which nodes we use. Where you have no GPUs, we run models on dedicated machines in Pilae Cloud.

Does this help with funder data management requirements?

Funders such as the Swiss National Science Foundation and Horizon Europe ask for a data management plan. We give you the facts that plan needs: where each dataset is stored, how it is backed up, who can reach it and how it is exported in open formats at the end of the project.

Can students and guest researchers sign in with their university account?

Yes. Keycloak connects to your institution's identity provider over SAML or OpenID Connect, and roles decide which apps and projects each person reaches.

Related

Solutions

Private AI

A private ChatGPT for your teams in Switzerland: Open WebUI, LibreChat or Dify, open-weight models in your perimeter, answers grounded in your own documents.

Platform

On your premises

Open-source apps on your own servers, operated by Pilae: installed, patched, backed up and monitored without your data leaving the building.

Trust

Data residency

Your data stays in the country you choose, Switzerland, the EU or your premises, operated by a Swiss company under Swiss law.

Trust

Swiss nLPD

How Pilae supports your controller obligations under the revised FADP: processor agreement, records, data security and breach reporting.

Start with one faculty or one lab.

Thirty minutes with an engineer. We come back with a fixed-price pilot for the group you choose.

Talk to our teamBook a 30-minute briefing