I was born in East Germany. Behind the wall. In a system where the government controlled what you could know, what you could say, and what you could see. Socialism sounds nice on paper. In practice, it makes people dependent, blind, and afraid.
That experience never left me. It's the reason I'm building what I'm building.
Here is what nobody tells you about public data: it is designed to be invisible.
The government publishes everything. They have to. FOIA, the STOCK Act, the Open Government Data Act — these laws require transparency. But the data is scattered across thirty different websites with thirty different interfaces, thirty different formats, thirty different search systems.
Nobody checks all thirty. Nobody has the time. Nobody connects the dots.
A company can have FDA recalls AND OSHA violations AND CFPB consumer complaints AND active lobbying on the regulations that govern them — and no single system shows you that picture. Until now.
C.F.A.I. does one thing: it connects the dots.
You type a name. You see every federal record tied to that entity. Cross-referenced. Sourced. Dated. From thirty databases on one page.
No AI opinions. No generated summaries. No predictions. Just the data the government already published, organized so a normal person can actually find it.
I built this from Sacramento. No team. No investors. No office. Two servers at twelve dollars each. One AI partner that writes code while I drive home from Starbucks.
I am a former nurse. I taught myself to code three weeks ago. I failed with ChatGPT, failed with Lovable, failed with Replit, failed with n8n. I kept starting over because the mission was bigger than any single tool.
Then I found the right tool. And in one day, we went from ninety-seven thousand records to three million.
People ask me what C.F.A.I. is for. Here is my answer:
It is for the journalist who needs to investigate a company without spending three weeks checking thirty websites.
It is for the compliance officer who needs to know if a vendor has federal enforcement actions before signing a contract.
It is for the citizen who wants to know what the government already knows about the institutions in their life.
It is for anyone who believes that public data should actually be public.
The platform updates every night at 3 AM. New filings, new enforcement actions, new records — harvested automatically from thirty federal sources. The database grows while I sleep.
This is not a startup. This is infrastructure. Public accountability infrastructure.
And it is just the beginning.