About Franklin DiscoveryTM

Why we built Franklin Discovery

AI that can show you why.

WHY WE BUILT IT

AI has gotten very good at giving you an answer. What it can’t always do is show you why or let you prove it. For most work, that’s fine. For a lawyer staking a filing on it, or a contractor deciding which bids to chase, the answer matters less than whether you can stand behind it. We built Franklin Discovery for that. It works only from the documents you give it, traces every answer back to its source, and shows the reasoning that got there. Most AI asks you to trust the answer. Franklin Discovery lets you check it.

WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT

Most AI reaches an answer in ways no one can fully trace. Franklin Discovery is built the other way. It runs on an explicit model of meaning, so every answer ties back to your own documents and to a path you can follow. You can always see why it surfaced what it did.

The Technology

BUILT-IN UNDERSTANDING OF LANGUAGE

Franklin Discovery comes with conceptual knowledge built in, in effect, an embedded dictionary, thesaurus, and encyclopedia, mapped into a foundation ontology. It understands the meaning of words before it ever reads your documents.

NEUROSYMBOLIC BY DESIGN

Neurosymbolic means two kinds of AI working together. The neural side spots patterns in language, the way today’s models do. The symbolic side checks them against an explicit map of meaning and a set of rules, so what comes back checks out.

IT ONLY KNOWS WHAT YOU GIVE IT

Franklin Discovery answers only from the content you ingest, never the open web. Your information stays within the system, and because it relies on curated content, hallucinations are rare.

What we stand for

YOUR DATA IS YOURS

We don’t train on it, sell it, or move it out of your environment.

SHOW THE WORK

Every answer traces back to the document and the reasoning behind it.

KNOW THE LIMITS

When the answer isn’t in your documents, it says so.

WHEN GOOD ENOUGH ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH

We built it for the kind of work that doesn’t forgive mistakes.

Our patent position
We invented the technology and own the patents behind it.

CLOSE TO 500 PATENT ASSETS

Our portfolio spans 27 patent families.

PRIORITY DATES TO 2010

We were filing on our models years before the current wave of AI.

BOTH KINDS OF AI

The patents cover how machines work with language and how they represent meaning.

THE CORE IS OURS

Franklin Discovery isn’t a prompt layer on someone else’s model. The ontology and reasoning are ours, patented, and built in-house.

END TO END

The patents cover the full method Franklin Discovery uses, not one piece of it.

The Franklin Discovery Team

Proven Leadership. Deep Technical Roots.

The people behind Franklin Discovery have spent their careers building systems that couldn’t afford to fail, the kind of technology that runs underneath the internet and the wireless networks people use every day, built at companies like Motorola, Cleversafe, and IBM. They bring decades of work in AI and enterprise systems, plus one of the deepest patent portfolios in the field. They came together around a harder problem: getting a machine to understand language well enough that you can rely on what it tells you.

Tom Shirley

President & Chief Executive Officer
Led product development for Cleversafe through its $1.3 billion sale to IBM, after decades of software and business leadership at Motorola. Holds more than 70 patents.

Leadership

Tom MacTavish

Chief Design Officer
Helped create Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11) as Director of Engineering for the team behind it, with earlier work at Motorola Labs’ Center for Human Interaction and NCR Research.

Andy Chu

Head of Product Development
Ran North American Packet Core R&D at Nokia and served as a Director of Engineering at Motorola, both deep in large scale network infrastructure.

Gordon Gruszka

Chief Financial Officer
Finance and business leadership across Motorola, Motorola Mobility, Google, and Deutsche Post DHL Group, plus a board seat at BiznusSoft, a SaaS provider on the Salesforce platform.

Crystal Jones

Chief Marketing Officer
Drives strategic growth for B2B tech companies, from startups to global enterprises, with marketing leadership that has propelled multiple companies to 100%+ year-over-year growth and several to billion-dollar valuations and acquisitions, including Cleversafe’s $1.3 billion sale to IBM.

Gary Grube

Patent Agent, Careus Institute
Behind two billion-dollar exits, Motorola to Google for $5.5 billion and Cleversafe to IBM for $1 billion, with $10 billion in patent value created. Holds 646 issued patents at a 99% allowance rate, ranked first among U.S. patent agents.

Dennis Roberson

Board Chairman

Chair of the board, with a career across Motorola, IBM, Digital Equipment Corporation, AT&T, and NCR. Now runs Roberson and Associates and chairs The Marconi Society, with past board seats at Cleversafe and Zarlink.

Board of Directors

Tom Shirley

President and CEO

Sits on the board as President and CEO.

Samme Thompson

Board Member
A career across Telit Associates, Motorola, AT&T, and McKinsey & Company, with academic ties to the University of Chicago and the University of Pittsburgh. Board seats include American Tower and Spok Holdings.

Amreesh Modi

Board Member

Chief Technology Officer at NAVTEQ through its $8.1 billion sale to Nokia, after executive roles at Motorola behind the industry’s first SMS, and fifteen years at AT&T Bell Labs. Now invests in and mentors early-stage technology companies.

Try it on YOUR OWN DOCUMENTS.

The best way to judge Franklin Discovery is to use it. Bring your hardest case and see what it finds.