Projects move at varying speeds: some shift rapidly from ideation to product while others take a slower and more thoughtful approach. For Rook, Hypha’s new agentic knowledge management tool, we’ve been deliberately considered about how and why we move into the AI space. This is not only because the market is a little saturated with LLM-esque tools, but also because we wanted to offer something that could be useful to organizations working within and serving the solidarity economy, as well as arts and cultural institutions, and organizations who value digital sovereignty and data privacy. Emphasizing care and consideration might be anathema to the typical AI product release cycle, but these values, along with quality, are what make Rook different.

Rook is powered by your organization’s data. You give it access to the files and folders you want it to query, and it then returns responses based on that data. Nothing is ever trained on your data, and the infrastructure is configured to be privacy-preserving. Our demo, which you can see here, gives you an idea of how Rook could work with your organization’s knowledge base.

At Hypha, we’ve been using this AI knowledge management tool internally for over a year, building it out under the open source project known as RooLLM (named after our digital office pet). And while much of this work will remain open source, for organizations lacking an internal IT department, we wanted to make the tools accessible as a product that Hypha can customize and deploy for interested organizations.

In keeping with our thoughtful approach, today’s announcement is more of a soft launch, as we’re looking for partners to help us make Rook the first choice tool for privacy-conscious social enterprises, cooperatives, cultural organizations and progressive thinktanks. Hypha is pleased to announce that we are already collaborating with jason wiener | p.c., the preeminent law firm for mission-driven companies, social impact, and environmental enterprise. Based in Boulder, Colorado, Jason and his team have already provided valuable feedback on Rook’s response quality, and on data privacy considerations.

We are actively seeking organizations interested in supporting Rook as a key piece of the solidarity stack. Get in touch if this resonates with you.