Stirling tech firm Vidai launches ‘tiny’ AI tool to stop sensitive data leaks

Nagu Gopalakrishnan, Co-Founder and CPTO of Vidai UK

Homegrown Scottish startup tackles global privacy concerns with ultra-compact software that runs locally on standard office hardware.

Scottish artificial intelligence startup Vidai UK has launched a lightweight AI Model designed to solve one of the tech sector’s biggest security headaches: keeping sensitive customer data safe and strictly within company boundaries.

Named Stirling-Minimo PII, the open-weight model automatically identifies personal details including names, addresses, and financial account numbers so they can be redacted before information ever leaves an organisation’s internal network.

While most AI guardrail tools rely on energy-intensive cloud server networks, Vidai built its custom architecture from scratch so it sits directly in the path of live data. At just 10 million parameters and a file size of roughly 40MB, the single portable file is small enough to run on an ordinary office CPU or edge device without specialist hardware.

By checking data inside local infrastructure, organisations can comply with strict GDPR and data residency requirements, avoid the extra network hop, and eliminate the security risks of sending raw data to external providers.

Despite its tiny footprint, the Scottish-developed model matches the accuracy of industry giants. Stirling-Minimo PII scored 0.904 on the PIIMB English benchmark and is officially ranked third out of 36 global entries on its public leaderboard, alongside models with more than 100 times as many parameters.

Nagu Gopalakrishnan, Co-Founder and CPTO of Vidai UK, said, “Sending sensitive information to an external cloud service just to check if it contains private data completely defeats the purpose of privacy protection. We built Stirling-Minimo in Scotland to give organisations absolute authority over their own data footprint. ScotlandStirling is proving to be an exceptional hub for deep-tech innovation, proving that world-class, privacy-first AI can be built right here rather than imported from Silicon Valley.”

Dr Priya Mothilal Bhagavathy, Co-Founder of Vidai UK, said, “The industry trend has favoured making AI models bigger and more expensive to run. We took the opposite approach, researching a custom architecture from first principles to compress advanced detection capability into a tiny, portable file. It delivers high-precision data protection without the massive energy or hardware cost.”

Former Scottish Government Minister for Business Richard Lochhead, who oversaw the publication of Scotland’s latest AI Strategy, commented: “The future of enterprise AI hinges on trust, safety, and data sovereignty, and Scotland-based Vidai is being recognised as a leader in tackling the privacy problem head-on. Building a world-class model that keeps sensitive business, health, and financial data firmly within a company’s own walls is what’s needed for successful AI adoption, and this is a proud milestone for Scottish engineering.”

Ruari Fairbairns, Founder of Founder Engine, said, “Most business leaders I speak with want to adopt AI, but stall on one fundamental question: where does our customer data actually go? A model this small that answers that question directly inside a company’s existing setup removes a major barrier to adoption. It’s brilliant to see this calibre of technical engineering coming out of Scotland.”

James Varga, Founding Partner of Somai, said: “Every organisation is now trying to put its own knowledge to work with AI, and the honest blocker is that the most valuable context is also the most sensitive. Most of the AI leakage I see today isn’t malicious; it’s staff pasting customer data into tools because nothing is stopping it at the boundary. A redaction model small enough to run on the hardware a business already owns moves privacy from a policy document to a control in the data path. That matters more than raw scale, and it’s good to see that kind of engineering judgement coming out of Scotland.”

Stirling-Minimo PII is the first model in Vidai’s Stirling-Minimo series, with dedicated versions for healthcare, financial technology (fintech), and cyber-defence against prompt-injection attacks already built and scheduled for release shortly.

The model is available immediately on Hugging Face at huggingface.co/VidaiUK/stirling-minimo-pii-10m under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license (free for non-commercial use). Commercial enterprise licensing is available directly from Vidai UK.

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