As artificial intelligence becomes more embedded in daily life, two University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences seniors think the technology is heading in the wrong direction, getting bigger, more centralized, and further from the people who actually use it. Their startup, Textile, is built on a different idea.
Founded by Alexandr Kim and Ethan Tieu, Textile is building an on-device AI system that helps people organize, search, and make sense of sensitive personal documents, without ever sending that information to an outside server. Everything runs locally on the user’s laptop. No Wi-Fi is required after the user downloads Textile.
The idea didn’t start as a startup pitch. Kim and Tieu were part of an applied computer science research group at the University called Bonsai, where 40 students work on interdisciplinary projects spanning medicine, law, and business. As the group grew and took on more complex work, they started building internal tools just to keep things organized. That software eventually became the foundation for Textile.
“At first, we built the tool for ourselves,” Kim said. “We were trying to organize our own teams and our own files. Then we realized the problem was much bigger than us.”
The product is designed for exactly the kinds of documents people are most reluctant to hand over to a tech company, like medical records, financial files, legal paperwork, and estate planning materials. With Textile, users can search and analyze that information through an AI interface without it ever leaving their device.
“Why should your most personal information have to leave your computer just to be useful?” Kim said. “We want people to be able to understand their own files without handing them over to a giant corporation.”
That question sits at the heart of what Textile is trying to prove: that some of the most valuable applications of AI don’t require massive data centers. They just require a smarter approach.
“It’s a contrarian idea right now,” Kim acknowledged. “A lot of the industry assumes intelligence has to live in the cloud. We’re trying to show that some of the most important uses of AI can happen directly on your machine.”
The startup has gained early traction. Textile took first place at the University’s EPIC Startup Competition, secured a $100,000 investment from the USTAAR program, and the venture-backed company is currently beta testing its software.
The company’s name comes from the location of its first office. While working in New York over the summer, Kim and his team realized they had inadvertently set up shop in the city’s historic textile district. The word stuck — “textile” carries “text” inside it, a nod to the idea of weaving information together, and it felt distinctly human compared to the tech-heavy names that dominate the industry.
After graduation, Tieu, who is double majoring in neuroscience and computer science at the College of Arts and Sciences, plans to work at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) while continuing to build Textile with Kim.
For Kim, who is finishing a dual degree in computer science at the college and business at the Miami Herbert Business School, Textile is also the product of years spent building things with people he trusts. He launched a volunteer-focused tech initiative back in high school, helped scale the University research group that eventually spawned the company, and is now preparing to move with several teammates to New York after graduation to build Textile full-time.
Still, he’s not eager to leave Miami behind in spirit. “I’d love for this to be one of those companies that people look back on and say came out of Miami,” he said. “There’s so much talent here.”
