About Pleco
Pleco builds infrastructure people own rather than rent — at every layer.
The idea
Universal basic infrastructure
A lot of the tools a person or a business depends on are rented, not owned. You log into someone else’s platform, your data lives on their servers, and they take a cut — or hold the keys — for as long as you keep using it. Pleco builds the other version: infrastructure you own outright, built once, serviceable by anyone, with the data in your hands.
That comes down to three commitments, and they hold at every layer we work in:
- Software as a trade. You hire a builder the way you hire a plumber, and you own the result — not a subscription to someone else’s platform.
- Programs as appliances. Bought once, built from standard parts, serviceable by any technician. No lock-in, no metered access to your own tool.
- Full data sovereignty. You hold your own data — the member list, the record, the model, the result — wherever the work runs.
One idea, four layers
The same conviction, four scales
The four projects apply one conviction at different scales. The layer changes; the principle doesn’t.
- CODEC — the small-business layer. Membership and club programs that run on a business’s own Square or Stripe. Built once, open-source core, no platform cut. codec.pleco.dev
- Pleco Photonics — the compute layer. A photonic processing architecture for computation at the point of use, rather than renting cycles from a hyperscaler. Research and patent-stage. photonics.pleco.dev
- Promise Pipeline — the civic layer. Public-accountability tooling for nonprofits, neighborhood associations, and local government. Commons-owned and AGPL-3.0, sponsored through Aspiration, run separately from Pleco’s commercial work. github.com/koda-wzkp/promise-engine
- Pleco Kineτics — the research layer. Open, mechanism-first methodology and commons data for drug-target binding kinetics. kinetics.pleco.dev
How we work
Build it to hand over
Whatever the layer, the work is built to be handed over. On the commercial side that means standard parts, documented, in a repository with the client’s name on it — anyone can service it, and leaving costs nothing. On the research side it means the same discipline pointed at knowledge: mechanism-first work before any modeling, methodology and acceptance criteria fixed before evaluation, and honest negative results when they happen.
How we operate
The company
Pleco LLC is an independent research-and-build company in Portland, Oregon. It runs on a mix of commercial revenue, consulting, and grant work — not VC-backed, not a hyperscaler, not a quant fund. Promise Pipeline is a separate nonprofit effort, sponsored through Aspiration and licensed AGPL-3.0; it shares the conviction but not the balance sheet.
Founding
Who
Founded 2026 by Conor Nolan-Finkel.
Contact