Building the evidence layer
for operational AI.
I'm Stephen Aitken, founder of YSEEKU and builder of SONATE. I spent twenty years in regulated fintech operations, where audit trails, accountability, and controls were not abstract concepts — they were how the business survived scrutiny. SONATE is the infrastructure I believe AI now needs.
What I'm building
SONATE is a cryptographic audit layer for AI systems.
As AI moves from experiments into regulated workflows, organisations need a way to prove what happened after the fact — not just trust a dashboard, transcript, or vendor-controlled log.
SONATE generates cryptographically signed Trust Receipts for every interaction — independently verifiable by regulators, clients, and counterparties.
The Operator
Stephen Aitken spent two decades in regulated fintech operations — managing teams, navigating audits, building processes that had to survive regulatory scrutiny.
That background shaped a specific instinct: if something consequential happens, you need a verifiable record. Not a log. Not a screenshot. Evidence.
When AI started making real decisions in production systems — approving loans, drafting clinical notes, generating legal analysis — the absence of execution evidence became obvious to anyone who'd ever sat across from a regulator.
That is the founder-market fit: operations, risk, compliance, and decision systems were the environment I came from before AI made the evidence problem urgent.
The Insight
We have TLS for networks. Code signing for software. Digital signatures for financial transactions. But AI had nothing — no standard way to prove what a model received, what it returned, or whether it complied with policy.
Non-repudiation is a solved problem everywhere except AI execution.
SONATE exists to close that gap: cryptographically signed, hash-chained Trust Receipts that anyone can verify independently, without trusting the platform that generated them.
The shift from experimental AI to operational AI creates a new requirement: verifiable auditability.
Built solo. Powered by AI.
SONATE was built entirely through AI-assisted development — a solo founder with no traditional engineering background, using LLMs as the development team.
The result: 200,000+ lines of production code across a 20-package TypeScript monorepo, Python SDKs, a 30-page enterprise dashboard, and live cryptographic infrastructure — shipped in under twelve months.
This isn't a limitation. It's proof of the thesis.
If one person can build production infrastructure this complex using AI, imagine what autonomous AI systems are doing inside enterprises right now — without any verifiable record.
Where we are
The platform is built. The cryptographic infrastructure is live. Trust Receipts are being generated and verified. The open-source SDKs are published.
The next step is intentional distribution: design partners in regulated industries, investors who understand AI infrastructure, and operators who need evidence when AI systems make consequential decisions.
We're raising pre-seed capital to fund the first enterprise design partners, hire engineering and go-to-market, and move from working product to operating company.
Melbourne, Australia · Founded 2025