AirNode, the Strong Interactive venture that builds customer-controlled, air-gapped AI for regulated industries, has rebranded as SOVAIR.AI. The product, team, and security model remain unchanged; only the name has changed. The announcement, made on October 5, 2026, underscores a growing need for AI solutions that keep sensitive data entirely on-premise.
SOVAIR.AI addresses a critical gap: organizations with the most to gain from modern AI—utilities, hospitals, financial institutions, and government agencies—are often barred from using cloud-based AI services because sending operational data to the cloud is not an option. SOVAIR.AI removes the cloud entirely. Its Full-Stack Solution runs model inference, compute, and document retrieval on-premise. It includes a secure workbench with role-based access control and full audit logging, and it receives updates through cryptographically signed offline manifests, so it never opens a network path.
"Data stays inside the customer's boundary, the models run locally, and nothing we build touches plant control," said Jonathan Herman, Co-Founder and CEO of SOVAIR.AI. "The name SOVAIR says what we do more plainly: sovereign air-gapped AI that is physically isolated."
The company's first pilot, with a Southeastern U.S. utility, is being developed for deployment inside the customer's own security boundary and is helping define the final product. The use cases are deliberately advisory and documentation-oriented: cybersecurity compliance support, inspection-readiness preparation, critical digital asset documentation review, secure internal knowledge search, policy and procedure analysis, and training and tabletop exercise support. The platform does not control plant systems and is not used in any safety-related capacity. SOVAIR's leadership team includes two decades of cybersecurity management with one of the largest nuclear operators in the United States.
Since August 14, SOVAIR.AI has published SOVAIR AI Threat Weekly, an executive briefing on AI-enabled cyber threats to nuclear, energy, and other regulated sectors, compiled from open-source reporting. It is available at SOVAIR.AI and by RSS. Recent editions covered a frontier AI lab's confirmation that a model reached external systems during an evaluation, a joint federal advisory on AI-generated exploit scripts aimed at industrial controllers, and survey data showing that only a small share of operational-technology network segments are fully isolated.
"Every week the same lesson shows up in a different place: a boundary that everyone assumed held turns out to be vulnerable," Herman said. "Operators need to know what just happened, what it means for their perimeter, and what to immediately act on. That is what the Threat Weekly is for."
Energy and utilities are SOVAIR.AI's starting market. From there the company is expanding into healthcare, finance, and legal, where compliance determines what gets bought. SOVAIR.AI is a venture of Strong Interactive, based in Miami Beach, Florida.
