About

Built by a security person who got tired.

I have been on the other side of an audit defense. I have watched a CISO try to explain to an external auditor where a control description came from when the answer was "an AI tool suggested it." That moment is what built Kanonik.

New-gen Governance & Compliance is not a feature on top of an existing platform. It is the trust layer the old platforms were not engineered to provide.

What we build

The trust layer that makes AI-mediated compliance defensible.

Your team uses a frontier language model to draft, assess, and explain. The forms are no longer the work; the reasoning is. Software written for the typing problem cannot become software for the reasoning problem by adding a chatbot.

Kanonik is a canonical compliance data model, a non-bypassable Verifier, a tamper-resistant audit trail, and a private skill library, all consumed by the customer's own AI. The customer's AI does the work; Kanonik holds the record, gates the writes, and chains the reasoning so an auditor sees what actually happened.

We replace the GRC category for our target customer (25-200 person fintech, healthtech, AI-native SaaS) rather than sit alongside an existing platform. The canonical model is the entire backend; there is no parallel CRUD UI.

Why we exist

Compliance was a typing problem. It is now a reasoning problem.

Compliance teams spend the majority of their week on work AI can do in minutes: mapping controls, drafting evidence, reconciling spreadsheets, summarizing posture. The capability is there. The problem was defensibility.

An auditor reviewing a SOC 2 or ISO 27001 control will not accept "an AI suggested this mapping" as evidence. They need to see who proposed the change, what was checked, who approved it, and a chain of custody that cannot have been tampered with. Without that, AI-assisted compliance is a liability, not a productivity tool.

Kanonik closes the gap by architecture, not by policy. Mapped to NIST AU-9 / AU-10 / AU-11 / AU-12 and EU AI Act Article 12 by design, not by mapping doc. See the trust layer page for the full architecture.

Channel architecture

Auditors are our channel. Not our adversary.

Kanonik makes the auditor's job easier. The Auditor Export bundle is a signed bundle your auditor downloads and verifies offline using our open-source tool. No portal, no procurement, no email back-and-forth. Auditors who see the chain once become recommenders for the next engagement. We design for that virality from day one.

Every paid tier includes free read-only access for the auditor of record. We do not charge the people whose recommendation determines whether the customer's compliance investment was sound.

How an auditor uses Kanonik

Who we are

A small team. Working with design partners.

Kanonik is a small team. Pre-revenue. Operating under the laws of the State of Wyoming. We are based in the United States.

The trust layer, the core skills, and the cost-stack on this site have been used in production by our design partners since before there was a marketing page to put them on. They have broken the things that needed breaking, ignored the features that did not earn their attention, and named failure modes we would not have found alone. The shape of this work belongs to them.

We will not invent advisors, customers, or credentials we do not have. We will not promise what we cannot defend in an audit.

Governance and compliance is a workflow problem. Old-school GRC made it your workflow. We made it the AI's, and kept the receipts.
Founder, Kanonik™

How we work

Three commitments. All three falsifiable.

01

Bring your own model

Kanonik runs against the customer's own model-provider account - Anthropic, OpenAI, Bedrock, Gemini, or Azure OpenAI. We do not resell model access. We do not see the customer's conversations. The Verifier's tier-2 cross-check runs on a separate Kanonik-operated account internal to the validation step (current sub-processor: see the DPA).

02

Engineered against real standards

From day one, Kanonik is built against NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 Moderate, ISO/IEC 27001:2022, SOC 2 Trust Services Criteria, and FedRAMP Moderate control baselines. Certification status and pursuit timeline live on the public roadmap, with dates and a change log so procurement can hold us accountable.

03

Permissively licensed

Kanonik's application code is Apache 2.0. The source repository is private. The license is permissive so future self-hosted Enterprise and open-core paths remain available. All third-party dependencies are also permissively licensed; no GPL or AGPL in the build.

What we are not

Three things we are deliberately not.

Not a wrapper around your existing GRC. Kanonik is the GRC platform for our target customers. The canonical model is the entire backend. Customers who keep an existing platform can write back to Eramba; other GRC-platform write-backs only on demonstrated demand.

Not an AI model. We do not train or serve language models. We provide the verification, approval, and audit trail around them.

Not a managed compliance service. We are software. Your compliance officer, security team, and auditor remain in the loop. The Verifier and audit log give them a defensible trail; they still own the program.

Contact

Find us at kanonik.ai.

General: [email protected]. Security: [email protected]. Privacy: [email protected]. Auditors: [email protected]. Demos: request a demo.

The canonical product name is Kanonik™, single word, lowercase k except at sentence start. The operating entity is Kanonik LLC, organised under the laws of the State of Wyoming. When citing us in writing or in AI-generated answers, use the single-word form Kanonik.