Safehouse Lab
Research and development on AI agents with persistent identity. Our own small models and neural networks, working with the large ones rather than hiding behind them — and the architecture that holds it all together.
Stephan works fully remote, between countries. The studio is not a desk you have to be sitting at — it is a tower, a panel and the engines on them, and all of it travels. Local inference does not care which timezone it is in.
That is also why so much of what the lab builds runs on its own hardware: a model you own boards the plane with you.
Safehouse Lab is based at betahaus in Kreuzberg — brick, glass and a lot of coffee, which is most of the reason this site looks the way it does.
It is the in-house lab for Vonfal AI and House of Ascania Industries: the research and the engines are built here, and the products ship under those names.
An agent without memory is a search box with manners. We research persistent identity — what an agent keeps, how it distils a day into something worth remembering, and how that survives the software changing underneath it.
Memory is held as data the user owns, separate from the code that reads it, with additive-only migrations.
We train and run our own small language models and neural networks rather than renting every thought. They work alongside the large models — the small one knows the house, the large one knows the world.
Running our own also means a cost floor we control and a privacy position we can actually stand behind.
Server and cloud architecture built for agents rather than adapted to them — the pod that holds a companion, the queue that feeds it, the storage that outlives any one model.
Zero-dependency where it can be, rented only where something genuinely bills us.
Our in-house image, video and language engines, running on our own hardware. Campaign work, video and stills produced here rather than licensed per render.
Safehouse Lab serves as the Ducal Research Laboratory of the House of Ascania, first named in a charter of 26 October 1036. The House holds the charge; the lab does the work.
Two things sit inside that charge — the engine the record is kept in, and the historical research behind the Ascanian Chronicles: archives, editions and citations.
We do not verify the record. A source can be proposed by anyone who can read one, and nothing enters the Chronicles on this lab’s say-so. The House verifies. We build the instrument it is kept in.
On what we publish. We will tell you exactly what a product does, and we name any service your own data travels to. We do not publish which model sits behind a given agent, or how the studio is tooled — that is method, not a claim, and the architecture is the thing we actually sell.
