Ask Us Anything

THE WHEEL is a private knowledge engine — a place to store notes, documents, and conversations that becomes searchable and useful over time.

Think of it as a second brain that actually respects your privacy. Your data is encrypted, your identity is anonymized when external AI is needed, and you control everything.

Most AI tools are a single pipe to one provider — everything you type goes to OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google in readable form. THE WHEEL is different in three ways:

1. Your knowledge compounds. Upload documents, jot notes, have conversations — THE WHEEL connects them over time. ChatGPT starts fresh every session (or remembers unpredictably). THE WHEEL builds on everything you've given it.

2. Simple questions stay internal. "What did my doctor say about my knee?" is answered by our internal AI using your encrypted data. No external provider involved. ChatGPT sends that query — and your medical context — to their servers.

3. Complex questions are anonymized. When external AI is needed for creative reasoning, we strip identifying details first. ChatGPT has no anonymization layer — your name, dates, and context go as-is.

Yes. THE WHEEL is designed to work with your existing AI workflows — not replace them. You have full flexibility to use the tools you prefer, while keeping your knowledge centralized and private.

Export your chat history: Download complete conversation threads from THE WHEEL to import into other tools or archive for your records.

Get anonymized queries: Before we send complex questions to external AI (when internal models aren't sufficient), we anonymize your data. You can access these sanitized prompts and use them directly in ChatGPT, Claude, or any AI tool you prefer — keeping your original context private.

Import conversations back: Used another tool for specialized work? Import those conversations back into THE WHEEL so your knowledge stays complete and searchable in one place.

Use it however works best for you: Whether you want THE WHEEL as your primary AI, a privacy-first knowledge vault, or a bridge between tools — it adapts to your workflow. Your data, your tools, your choice.

Smart routing means THE WHEEL decides whether your question can be answered internally or needs external AI. Simple lookups — "what did my doctor say about my knee?" — are handled by our internal models using your encrypted data.

For personal use: Yes. THE WHEEL is designed to be secure and private. You can upload your personal health information — doctor visit notes, test results, medication lists — and it's protected with the same encryption we use for all data.

Important clarification: User-uploaded information is not subject to HIPAA. HIPAA applies to healthcare providers, not to individuals managing their own health data. When you upload your own medical records to THE WHEEL for personal use, you're managing your own information in a private, encrypted space.

For healthcare providers: We do not currently recommend healthcare providers use THE WHEEL for patient data. We have not completed a formal HIPAA compliance audit, and we do not yet offer Business Associate Agreements (BAAs). Healthcare-specific compliance measures are planned as we enter that market.

The system is secure: Your data is encrypted at rest (AES-256-GCM), encrypted in transit (TLS 1.3), and keys are managed through hardware security modules (FIPS 140-2 Level 3 certified). But formal compliance validation for healthcare providers is a separate milestone we're working toward.

If you're a healthcare organization interested in using THE WHEEL, contact our team to discuss your compliance requirements and timeline.

Not yet. For the beta, you'll need to upload documents directly to THE WHEEL. We don't have automatic integrations with tools like Google Drive, Notion, Dropbox, or other services yet.

We've made it easier: We created a comprehensive guide showing you how to export your data from the most common tools — Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Notion, Slack, and dozens more. Once you have your files, you can upload them to THE WHEEL.

📥 View Export Guide for Common Tools

Coming later: Direct integrations are on the roadmap. We're focused on making the core experience rock-solid first, then we'll add the ability to automatically sync your knowledge from other tools. If there's a specific integration you need, let us know — your feedback helps us prioritize.

Yes. THE WHEEL understands that a medical document, a chat conversation, and a research paper each need to be processed differently to stay useful and searchable.

What this means in practice: When you upload a PDF, we detect what kind of document it is — a legal contract might be chunked to preserve clause boundaries, while a meeting transcript gets broken down by speaker and topic shifts. Conversations are handled differently than static documents so context flows naturally when you search.

Why it matters: Most systems treat everything like generic text. We preserve structure. That's why you can ask "what did my doctor say about my knee?" and get a precise answer instead of a wall of irrelevant paragraphs.

How it works: The system automatically detects content type. If you want to be specific — say, marking something as a conversation vs. a document — you can do that during upload for more accurate processing. If THE WHEEL can't figure it out, there are smart defaults built in so nothing gets left unprocessed. For most uploads, we suggest just letting the system figure out how it should be processed.

Yes. Your data is encrypted with AES-256 at rest and TLS 1.3 in transit. When external AI is needed, named entity recognition strips out identifying details: names, dates, locations, and contact info, before anything leaves THE WHEEL. Our architecture is private by design — your data can't be read without your key. Decryption only happens in volatile memory for the brief moment needed to generate a response, then that memory is wiped. You can export or permanently delete everything at any time.

All your encrypted content — documents, notes, conversations, and knowledge embeddings — is stored in Google Cloud Storage (GCS) in the United States. Metadata and pointers to that content live in PostgreSQL on Google Cloud Platform (also US-hosted).

A small amount of server-side data is stored unencrypted for the system to function: your email address, account preferences, subscription status, and basic usage metadata (e.g., storage quotas, last login). This is the minimum needed to run the service — none of your actual content is included.

Encryption keys are managed through Google Cloud's Hardware Security Modules (HSMs), also US-based. We're evaluating EU and multi-region options as we grow. If data residency is a requirement for your organization, reach out and we'll discuss your needs.

During beta, THE WHEEL is completely free — no credit card, no trial limits. We're using the beta period to find the right pricing model based on what features people actually use. Our commitment: private AI should be accessible to everyone, not just enterprises. Request beta access and you'll be the first to know when pricing is finalized.

Team access is coming soon. The personal product is available now, and you can start tagging work-related content today. When team access launches, you'll review what moves from your personal space to the company entity — nothing moves without your approval. Your team gets institutional memory from day one.

Internal AI: We currently use Gemma 3 12B (google/gemma-3-12b-it) as our internal model, hosted on our own infrastructure. Our testing indicates it performs best for our needs, but we are continuing to evaluate models. Examples of other models we have tested include Gemma 2, Qwen 3 (multiple sizes including VL-8B, 2.5-7B, and 2.5-3B), and Mistral 7B, among others. We also use a separate embedding model hosted on our infrastructure for vector search. This handles the majority of queries — lookups, summaries, search across your knowledge — without any data leaving our servers.

External AI (when needed): For complex reasoning, creative tasks, or questions that benefit from a frontier model, you can use Gemini models and choose between Gemini 2.5 Flash, Pro, and 3 Pro. We suggest Gemini 2.5 Pro for the best speed-to-quality-to-cost ratio. Before anything is sent externally, your query passes through our anonymization layer — identifying details are stripped and replaced with semantically equivalent substitutes.

Other models & BYOK (coming soon): We're building support for additional models and Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) — use your own API keys for OpenAI, Anthropic, or other providers. Your key, your quota, your choice of model. Anonymization still applies by default.

We never log your content. Your notes, documents, and the actual text of your queries are never stored in logs.

We do log metadata: timestamps, request identifiers, system performance metrics, and error diagnostics. This is necessary to operate the service, debug issues, and monitor system health. But the metadata never includes your actual content — no document text, no query content, no conversation history.

For internal AI queries: No content ever leaves THE WHEEL's infrastructure. Your encrypted data is decrypted in volatile memory only for the duration of processing, then immediately wiped.

For external AI queries: After anonymization strips identifying details, the sanitized query is sent to external providers. What logs they keep is governed by their policies (e.g., Gemini, OpenAI). We choose providers with strong privacy commitments, but you should review their terms if this matters to you.

Absolutely. You can export everything — notes, documents, conversations, insights — at any time in standard formats. You can also permanently delete specific items or your entire account. This isn't just a policy; it's how the system is built. Your data is yours.

THE WHEEL is in beta. That means it works — it's private, it's fast, and it's useful — but we're still learning what matters most to users. Here's what you can expect:

Early access to new features. We invite waitlist members first as capabilities roll out. You'll be the first to try what we're building.

Honest communication. We'll tell you when something is ready and when it isn't. No hype, no vague timelines.

Your feedback shapes the roadmap. All feedback is data. Loved a feature? Tell us. Something didn't work? We want to know. Your input directly influences priorities and design decisions. We've made it seamless to give feedback within the system — one click and you're back to your work.

Lightweight user interviews. We may ask for short feedback sessions to understand how you use THE WHEEL. These are optional, but they help us build something that actually solves your problems.

Clear expectations. Beta means things will evolve. Features may change based on what we learn. We'll communicate early and often so there are no surprises.

If you're comfortable with a product that's being actively shaped by its users, request beta access. If you'd rather wait until everything is polished, subscribe to updates and we'll let you know.