1 · title

CARLOS. Lower your costs, own your software.

Funding deck v2.1 · September 2026

2 · problem and opportunity

You rent your software. You own nothing.

Per seat, forever. Your data in someone else's tables. Their outage, their price rise, their roadmap.

Small teams are the most stuck: big tech for everythingAI got bolted onto the same slow, multi-tenant stackA handful of people can now build what took a company. Nowhere to put it they own.

3 · value proposition

One instance you own. Deploy it anywhere.

Your data, your host, your version, your right to leave. Cloud, hybrid, or on-prem: it's all the same to CARLOS.

Cheaper: idle apps run no processSafer: one team, one process, one fileFaster: prototype in production, canaries in seconds
an instance · one binary · one database file · one hostname

4 · underlying magic

One binary. One database file. One bucket. DNS.

Per team, per person, or per thing. That's the whole architecture.

Sleeps to object storage, wakes on request, anecdotally under 500 msEvery database streams to the bucket, 1 to 2 s behindReleases are hashes, channels are pointers, rollback is a pointer moveTrust classes S to C say what a host can see. Placement follows.
one release
→
hosted · awake
your hardware · asleep
self-hosted · awake

5 · business model

Owning beats renting. We charge for the move.

The SaaS vendors and the clouds have the money now. We get it by making owning cheaper than renting, and selling the migration.

non-profit · holds the code, the doctrine, the trademark, and a golden share in the arms belowThe CARLOS Foundation
non-profitR&DThe software, and the tools that check what the AI built.
non-profitCertificationAudits the trust classes. Builds nothing, sells nothing.
for-profit · money inConsultancyPaid migration and support.
for-profit · money inIncubatorLoans to small orgs building on CARLOS. Repaid with interest.

6 · go to market

Three doors. Sell the migration. Keep the software open.

Organisations

Run your company on it. Chat, mail, office, git, all yours.

Vendors

Ship your product as a fleet, not a fork. Enterprise already wants on-prem; the rest will ask.

Builders

Empty directory to live URL. Your agent already knows the way.

use.carlosframework.com · migrate.carlosframework.com · carlosframework.com/startYear two: regional hubs, lower-wealth regions on commodity hardware

7 · competitive analysis

Not one competitor. Every layer of status-quo complexity.

they offer
we say
Clouds
AWS and friends. Every primitive, assemble it yourself.
One binary, a bucket, DNS. That's the assembly.
PaaS
Fly, Render, Railway. Easy deploys, any stack.
Unopinionated, so the stack's weight comes with you. We're opinionated all the way down.
Frameworks
Rails, Django, Laravel.
Built before agents. Rastrillo is built for both.
Add-ons
Hosted DBs, Redis, Sidekiq, observability vendors.
Papering over what Linux and Go already give you. SQLite, goroutines, systemd.

None of it is needed at small-operator scale. And none of it can say: your customers own their instance and can leave with it.

8 · management team

One founder. A decade of shipping. Twenty to hire.

Paul Campbell built Tito, Eleven, Keymail and the family the shape was extracted from. Tito runs on CARLOS in three regions today.

Hiring twenty: verification, certification, sales, marketing, outreach, opsBoard and advisors: to be namedHonest: one founder and a lot of AI-built software
20

9 · financials and key metrics

Metrics we will report. Three years. No revenue today.

Year 1Incorporate, hire 20Lend to up to 100 orgs from a €10m bookTen paid migrations, first certifications
Year 2Regional hubsSecond loan cohortConsultancy in three regions
Year 3Consultancy worldwideFoundation self-sustainingRepayment record tested
Apps live (today: a dozen)Organisations lent to (target: up to 100)Migrations completedLoan repayment rate (target: 80%+)Certifications issued

10 · status, timeline, use of funds

Running today. €20m to make it everyone's.

Done

  • Open platform and framework, running
  • A dozen live apps: chat, mail, social, git, office, ticketing
  • Tito self-hosting in 3 regions; 17 databases restored in 16 s
  • Trust classes and agent skills published

Not yet

  • Certification, benchmarks, incorporation, a loan book
  • Next: certification live, first cohort lent, first vendor product on-prem
seed · grant to the foundation€10mTwenty people for a year, incorporation, certification, outreach, runway. Public assets stay public.
loan book · capital into the incubator€10mLent to up to 100 small organisations, worldwide. Repaid with interest; terms drafted with you.

Next: a second meeting. paul@rslw.com

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