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Forward Deployed · On-Premise AI

We Build the System Around Your Experts.

Fifteen years of hard-won expertise doesn't live in your documentation. It lives in your people. We sit with them first. The system comes after. Swappable hardware, swappable open-weight models, all of it on your floor.
What We Deploy

We don't have a lineup. We don't have set specs either.

Accelerators turn over every few months and the open models turn over faster, so the honest recommendation moves with them. Anyone selling you a fixed product is selling their inventory, not your answer. So there's no catalog and no standing recommendation here: the recommendation doesn't exist until Discovery has shown what you do. Then we configure and deploy whatever serves it, any hardware, any open-weight model, any data server rack.

That runs from a large estate on rack-mounted accelerators down to a small shop with a couple of desktop-class machines and a few laptops. Both are real answers, neither is the upsell, and both get built with room to grow. Own the gear already? We'll wire it, air-gap it, and hand it to your team the same way.

New to this? The FAQ and resource library cover deployment, models, and compliance in plain language.

Technology that ignores expertise gets ignored by the experts.

Why Island Mountain

What you get out of a deployment.

Air-Gapped by Design

  • Zero data egress
  • No third-party handling
  • Runs fully offline

Built Around the Work

  • We immerse before we spec
  • Discovery drives the config
  • Any hardware, any model

Woven Security Fabric

  • Budget-carrying tokens
  • Sealed receipt ledger
  • Tool-call governance

Yours to Run

  • No token fees, ever
  • No vendor or lab lock-in
  • Onboarded, not handed over
The Sovereign Stack

Sovereignty is an architecture, not a subscription.

Renting intelligence from someone else's data center turned your most sensitive work into their liability. We move the whole stack onto your floor: silicon, runtime, an open-weight model you keep, and the governance that holds it accountable. Every layer swappable, none of it metered.

How a deployment runs

Nobody can tell you what to buy before knowing what you'd use it for

01

Immerse

An intense stretch on-site with your senior people, managers, and founders. No discovery deck. We learn the work the way you run it.

02

Discover

We map the use-cases already sitting latent in your organization. Most of them nobody has said out loud yet.

03

Configure

We recommend the stack purchase for what Discovery turned up, then we deploy and configure it together, on-site, with room to grow.

04

Onboard

We onboard your team to workflows and agentic orchestration built for your vertical. A deployment nobody can operate is a very expensive shelf.

Where we deploy

Sovereignty, where the stakes run highest.

From the Blog

Field notes on local, sovereign AI.

July 26, 2026 Technical Strategy

ZimReaper Ran With a Human's Session. So Does Your AI Agent.

TA488's payload never needed privileges of its own. It inherited an authenticated Zimbra session, made only legitimate API calls, and minted itself an app-specific password that survives a password reset. A process with human session authority that provisions its own durable credential is the default shape of an AI agent.

Read →
July 25, 2026 Technical Strategy

Bonsai 27B Runs on a Phone. The Sovereignty Math Just Moved Again.

PrismML rounded a 27B multimodal model down to 1.125 bits per weight: 3.9 GB, phone-resident, 90 percent of its benchmark average intact, Apache 2.0. The floor under private multimodal AI just dropped again, and the category table says the deepest cuts land exactly where agentic work lives.

Read →
July 19, 2026 Strategy

Agentic Scar Tissue: How Long-Running Agents Drift

Long-running agents accumulate workarounds, retry policies, fallback paths, and defensive heuristics until operational history starts rewriting behavior. The case for an immutable Hour Zero, adaptation receipts, and behavioral fingerprints.

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July 16, 2026 Strategy Industry

Education Is the Deployment

The companies pulling away in the AI race aren't necessarily choosing better models; their orgs are learning faster. Forward Deployed Engineering is less a software discipline than an educational one - a good deployment leaves behind a team that thinks differently. Field Notes No. 001, infographic included.

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July 11, 2026 Technical Strategy

Agentic Infrastructure Is Shedding Its Scaffolding. The Controls Have to Land Somewhere.

Anthropic's platform team went on camera and read you the next year of agents: their own service accounts, agent-to-agent MCP traffic, scaffolding deleted, ambient execution, work you order with a budget attached. Every item on that list quietly moves a security control out of the model and into infrastructure. The only question left is whose building it sits in.

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July 10, 2026 Financial Strategy

Self-Hosted AI Inference and the $165,000 Rewrite

Anthropic rewrote Bun from Zig to Rust: 64 parallel Claude agents, 11 days, roughly $165,000 in tokens at API pricing. They never paid it; they own the infrastructure. What the labs' own economics admit about token billing, and what owning inference looks like at your scale.

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July 7, 2026 Technical Strategy

LLM Harnesses, Saddles, and the Paddocks that corral them

The word harness comes from draft animals we couldn't trust with the route. As the models earn it, the scaffolding gives way to a saddle, and the controls that hold, identity, egress, metering, audit, a kill switch, move off the animal and into the paddock. The only question left is whose paddock.

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Who shows up

The engineer in the room is the one who builds it.

The shadowing, the translation, the build: Basho Parks does all three. Nobody hands your workflow notes to a delivery team who never met your staff. No support tickets. No call centers. One engineer, one phone call, real answers.

Meet the Engineer

The Founder's Build Slot

I run every deployment myself. A slot holds your place.

Being on-site caps how many deployments run at once. Claiming a slot costs nothing and commits you to nothing. It holds your place in the queue, and any quote we scope together is locked for 90 days, GPU market be damned.

Claim a Build Slot No deposit · No commitment

Start a Conversation

No sales pitch. Tell us what the work looks like and we'll tell you straight whether we can help.

Or call directly: 1-341-441-8740

Explore the Platform

One sovereign stack, from silicon to governance

It all connects: the answers and resources to get you deploying.

FAQ

Straight answers on what a deployment looks like, how long we're on-site, model selection, air-gapping, and what you end up owning.

Read the FAQ →

Resources

Direct-answer briefs on air-gapped inference, HIPAA, ITAR/CMMC, the CLOUD Act, and on-premises AI cost.

Browse resources →

Contact

Tell us whose desk the work runs through. One engineer, one phone call, real answers, no sales pitch.

Start a scoping call →