Eleven USPTO Filings · One Patented Fabric

Institutional expertise, captured as owned, executable IP.

Stratus turns the knowledge inside your experts' heads into certified, auditable, machine-executable workflows — assets your enterprise owns, running in agents only you control.

See the products → The patent estate

The Third Unit of Account

Priced · Commodity

Tokens

AI usage, billed per token. Captured by model providers and hyperscalers. Commodity economics — prices falling, field crowded.

Priced · People-Bound

Tasks

AI training, sold as expert-hours to frontier labs. People-intensive — and the expertise flows out, into models everyone rents.

Unpriced · Open · Patented

Workflows

Institutional knowledge made executable, owned, and auditable. The certified workflow is the unit — and the column is open. This is the Stratus lane.

Why Now

The money is being audited.

Enterprise AI spending has entered its accountability phase. Spend that cannot prove its outcome is being cut — and governance tooling is what survives review.

Of 2,145 senior leaders surveyed report established AI ROI. The rest are still explaining the spend.

KPMG Global AI Pulse · Q2 2026

40%+

Of agentic AI projects projected to be canceled by 2027 on cost, value, and risk. Every canceled pilot is budget in search of governance and proof of value.

Gartner · 2026

150K

Agents in use at the average Fortune 500 by 2028, up from fewer than fifteen in 2025. The sprawl is arriving faster than any governance layer built to manage it.

Gartner · 2026

The question in the room is no longer whether AI works. It is why the money isn't coming back — and the answer lives at the workflow level, where Stratus operates.

The Product Line

One infrastructure layer. Three commercial entry points.

The fabric is built once. It reaches market as an extraction agent first, operates as an enterprise platform second, and licenses into other vendors' products third.

Entry 01 · In Design-Partner Deployment

Chorus Capture™

The Extraction Agent

Automated process discovery, built on a patented Lean Six Sigma interview discipline. The work a black belt did across weeks of interviews, performed in software — producing certified, executable workflows your enterprise owns.

Meter: per certified workflow captured

Entry 02 · Follows Capture

Maestro™

Fleet Control Plane

Governs any agent fleet on any platform: activity, accuracy, cost, trust, and audit. The neutral infrastructure beneath every agent management platform — with cryptographic provenance and deterministic replay built into the substrate.

Meter: per workflow execution

Entry 03 · The Licensing Play

COG Switch™

Embedded Fabric

The same routing and quality fabric, licensed inside third-party host platforms — gateways, agent frameworks, MLOps, vertical software. The per-transaction metering that powers royalty billing is itself claimed machinery.

Meter: per-transaction license royalty

One asset — the certified workflow — three meters. The customer owns their expertise: captured content is theirs forever. What they license is the engine that runs it. Their knowledge; our machine.

How It Works

Tacit knowledge in. Executable, auditable workflows out.

The extraction agent conducts the interview a process-improvement expert used to conduct. What comes out the other side is a certified workflow — the billable unit.

Step 1 · Capture

The expert describes their work

In plain English. The extraction agent probes for gaps, exceptions, and edge cases using a patented interview discipline — the tacit knowledge surfaces.

→

Step 2 · Compile

Language becomes notation

Plain-English descriptions compile into COG™ — a patented workflow notation where every symbol is a runtime instruction, not documentation.

→

Step 3 · Certify & Run

Verified, scored, executable

Multiple AI models adjudicate the captured workflow for fidelity to expert intent. The output executes on any model — with every step hash-chained and replayable.

The workflow outlives the models it runs on. Any captured workflow re-runs on next-generation models — and that portability is claimed in the patent estate. Every execution feeds a learning loop: the captured workflow gets cheaper and more accurate every time it runs. Capture is the wedge. The execution fabric is the moat.

The Patent Estate

Eleven filings. Five layers of moat.

Filed across every seam of the fabric — capture, notation, execution, audit, embedding, and federation — engineered as interoperable building blocks, designed to recombine into product configurations beyond the first.

The patent estate

Eleven USPTO filings spanning the stack, including a non-provisional under active examination. Modular by design: the blocks recombine without new filings.

Neutrality, extended below management

The market has validated neutral governance. Stratus extends neutrality beneath the management layer — into capture, execution, audit, and licensing.

Compounding data

Routing evidence accumulates with every transaction and federates across licensees — a network effect competitors start from zero on.

Regulatory precondition

Deterministic replay and cryptographic provenance are deployment preconditions in regulated industries — not premium features.

Methodology lock-in

Certification builds a practitioner ecosystem around the workflow discipline. Once captured in COG notation, switching means re-extracting everything.

The Landscape

Every alternative stops at a layer. Stratus spans the stack.

Gartner's March 2026 research named the Agent Management Platform category and rated it Transformational. Stratus operates the neutral infrastructure beneath that layer — and holds the one position nobody else occupies.

	Expert marketplaces people-powered	Deployment platforms own-platform, human capture	Agent management the AMP field	Stratus software · neutral · patented
Knowledge capture	○	○	—	●
Execution & routing	—	●	●	●
Governance & audit	—	●	●	●
Embedded licensing & federation	—	—	—	●

Existing platforms begin with agents that already exist. Stratus begins with human expertise — and capture is the position nobody holds.

The Founder

Loren R. Douglass

Founder & Chief Executive Officer

Loren Douglass founded Stratus Data Systems after thirty-five years in enterprise technology, financial services, and management consulting. He is the inventor of record on all eleven USPTO filings comprising the Stratus patent estate, and the author of the AI² book series. Stratus develops from bwtech@UMBC in Maryland.

CareerGoldman Sachs · Merrill Lynch

AIG · GE · Deloitte

EducationWharton, MBA

Johns Hopkins SAIS, MA

Johns Hopkins, BEE

CivicMD Economic Dev. Council

The Methodology, Documented — The AI² Series

Beyond AI

The foundational volume. Augmented Intelligence as a professional discipline, not a consumer technology.

The Augmented Thinker

The COG™ framework working handbook — the workflow discipline inside the Stratus fabric, documented.

III

The Augmented Organization

The institutional volume. How firms reorganize around captured, governed intelligence. In development.

Get in Touch

For design partners, investors, and the press.

Stratus is engaging a limited set of design partners in professional services, regulated financial institutions, and organizations facing documented knowledge-loss risk. For partnership, investment, or press inquiries, reach out directly.

loren.douglass@stratusdatasystems.com → +1 917 885 9699