How NeutronTech is Defying Industry Norms with On-Device AI Innovation

From a vision in Africa to transforming AI technology, Josh Hipps’ journey is both profound and pioneering. Founder of NeutronTech, Josh has redefined AI with tools that prioritize privacy and sovereignty—ensuring data never leaves the user's hands. This Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur Spotlight highlights Josh's evolution through faith, failure, and the unconventional strategy of using AI as a co-founder. His story is a testament to relentless innovation, proving that true sovereignty means independence from any platform. Join us as we explore how Josh’s mission-driven approach is reshaping industries and empowering global communities.

Hi, Josh Hipps! Thanks for joining us today. Tell us about your business. Who do you serve, how do you serve them, and what's the impact that your business and work makes?

NeutronTech is a sovereign AI company. We build productivity and intelligence tools that run entirely on your device—no cloud required, no data ever leaving your hands.

Our flagship product, NeutronStudio, is an all-in-one workspace that combines notes, word processing, spreadsheets, a full code environment, voice recording, transcription, and AI—all powered by on-device models that actually learn how you work over time. Think of it as everything you wish Microsoft Office and Adobe gave you, with a built-in AI pair programmer that has persistent context about your projects, your patterns, and your workflow. It runs on Mac, Windows, iPad, and iPhone.

We also build NeutronStar, a sovereign data tool for querying Excel, CSV, and JSON files locally, while NeutronStar Pro provides capabilities for AI-powered natural language. NeutronHealth, under our Nova product line, is a clinical AI assistant that runs Google's MedGemma model entirely on-device so patient data never touches someone else's server.

Who we serve: individual professionals, development teams, and enterprises who refuse to trade privacy for capability, especially in healthcare, finance, and any regulated industry where data sovereignty isn't optional. We also serve the mission space through MagnetarMission, which provides our tools at no cost, or reduced cost, to humanitarian, disaster response, and Christian mission organizations.

The impact is simple: we're proving that AI can be powerful and private at the same time. The industry has conditioned people to believe you have to hand your data to someone else's server to access real intelligence. We reject that. Your data, your device, your AI. It works whether you're online, offline, or in an air-gapped environment. That changes the game for clinicians who can't risk patient data exposure, for developers who need AI that actually understands their codebase without giving their IP away, and for teams in the field who don't have reliable connectivity but still need world-class tools.

Tell us about the moment you finally felt like you went from wantrepreneur to entrepreneur.

For me, there wasn't one single lightning bolt. It was a compounding of moments that made the shift undeniable.

I was already in the Startup Warrior accelerator, with my head down building NeutronTech, learning the fundraising landscape, sharpening the pitch, and doing the work. That alone felt like progress. But there's a difference between being in motion and having momentum. I think every wantrepreneur knows exactly what I mean. You're putting in the hours, you believe in what you're building, but there's still this quiet question in the back of your mind: does anyone else see what I see?

Then Qubit Capital came into the picture. They didn't just express interest—they picked us up after seeking us out; not the other way around. That was the moment things shifted. It wasn't just about the capital access or their investor network, although those matter. It was the external validation that gave me even more momentum. It was my "wow" moment.

What I'd been building in early mornings, late nights, and in between my full-time work—it finally had real market legs. Someone with even more skin in the game (global market) looked at NeutronTech and said, "this is worth backing."

What made it even deeper for me is that I'm a person of faith, and I'd been praying over this company long before anyone outside my circle knew it existed. When Qubit picked us up—on top of already being in Startup Warrior—it felt like confirmation. Not just market validation, but a sign that I was exactly where I was supposed to be, building exactly what I was called to build.

That's when I stopped feeling like someone who wanted to be an entrepreneur and started operating like one. The vision didn't change, but the posture did. I went from hoping this would work to knowing I was going to make it work.

Describe the moment or period in your life/career that motivated you to make the entrepreneurial leap.

Last July, God gave me a vision that changed everything.

I saw a kid in Africa splashing water on his face. It was just this simple and joyful moment. In the same vision, I saw myself. I was healthy, fit, and at peace. I knew, with a clarity I'd never experienced before, that I was standing in a moment God had been leading me toward for a long time.

That might sound dramatic, but you have to understand the context. I spent roughly 20 years wandering through life in the dark. Not homeless-in-the-streets dark—more like deep in sin, going through the motions, checking boxes, building someone else's vision, and never quite understanding why nothing felt like it fit. I had the career and the skills, but there was always this gap between where I was and where I knew I wanted to be.

That vision closed the gap. It connected the mission to the work—the idea that technology I build could reach someone like that kid, in a place where connectivity and resources aren't guaranteed, and still make a difference. That's literally what NeutronTech is designed to do. Sovereign AI that works offline, on-device, and with no cloud dependency. Tools that function whether you're in a San Francisco office or a village with no internet.

I didn't make the entrepreneurial leap because I found a market opportunity. I made it because I finally saw what 20 years of wandering was preparing me for, and I couldn't unsee it.

Describe a tool, service, or software that has been a game-changer for your business. How does it contribute to your success?

Claude Code by Anthropic. Without hesitation.

I'm a solo founder bootstrapping an entire sovereign AI platform—Mac, Windows, iPad, iPhone, a clinical AI assistant, and a standalone data tool—and Claude Code is the reason that's even possible.

Most people hear "solo founder" and assume I'm building a simple SaaS app. NeutronTech has a full product suite, multiple provisional patents, and a tech stack that includes on-device model orchestration, hierarchical memory systems, and a multi-step agentic reasoning workflow for clinical AI. Building all of that without a full engineering team would've been a fantasy five years ago. Claude Code made it real.

But it's not just the coding. What changed the game for me was having a thought partner that could go deep on architecture decisions, identify gaps in my technical approach, and even inspire solutions I hadn't considered. There were moments where I knew something was possible but couldn't see the path—and Claude helped me find it. It pushed my thinking on how to make on-device AI better, how to optimize the memory system, and how to structure things I'd never seen anyone else build before.

When you're bootstrapped and building alone, your biggest bottleneck isn't money—it's cognitive bandwidth. Claude Code gave me back bandwidth I didn't know I was missing. It's the closest thing to having a co-founder who's available at 2 AM, never gets tired, and understands your codebase.

We know that success is very often a non-linear path. Tell us about a failure, pivot point, or lesson that changed your course or direction and helped to get you where you are today.

Early on, I went all-in on Apple's ecosystem. I signed up to get access to the newest Foundation Model API, and I was building fast. I was building sovereign and on-device AI across Mac, iPad, and iPhone so fast, that I pushing the boundaries of what their platform could do in ways nobody else was doing at the time. I know, because that speed became a problem.

Apple's systems started flagging me as a malicious developer. I'd go to bed with a clean build and wake up to failures that weren't there the night before. Files I hadn't touched would be locked. Code injections appeared in my codebase that I didn't write. I reported it multiple times. Their developer support was unresponsive. It wasn't that anyone was stealing intellectual property—it was that their automated systems couldn't reconcile the pace and scope of what I was building, so they treated me like a threat.

I escalated through every channel I could. I got legal involved. I eventually filed complaints with the California Attorney General and the SEC. That got their attention. But by that point, the damage to the relationship was done. I made the decision to walk away from the Apple ecosystem almost overnight.

Here's where the lesson lives: that forced pivot turned out to be one of the best things that happened to NeutronTech.

When I was building Apple-first, every architecture decision was shaped by their ecosystem. When I ripped that dependency out, I was forced to rethink the entire system architecture from the ground up. The result was a system that's truly cross-platform—Mac, Windows, iPad, iPhone — not locked into anyone's walled garden. The sovereign AI thesis got stronger, not weaker, because now the technology isn't beholden to any single platform's rules or whims.

The lesson I took from it: when something that feels like sabotage forces you to rebuild, pay attention to what you build the second time. It's almost always better than what you had before. That whole experience confirmed something I already believed—if you're going to build sovereign technology, it has to be sovereign from everything, including the platforms you build on.

What unconventional strategy did you employ that significantly impacted your business?

I built the entire company with AI as my co-founder.

I mentioned Claude Code as a game-changing tool, but calling it a "tool" undersells what actually happened. The unconventional strategy was deciding that I didn't need a traditional engineering team to build a multi-platform sovereign AI company. I used AI-assisted development not just for writing code, but for architecture decisions, deep code audits, identifying technical gaps, and pressure-testing ideas that didn't exist anywhere else yet.

That meant I could move at a speed that literally got me flagged by Apple's security systems because they couldn't reconcile a solo developer producing that volume and complexity of work. When that forced me out of an Apple-first architecture, I made another unconventional call—I ripped out the entire platform dependency overnight and rebuilt for true cross-platform sovereignty. Most founders would have spent months negotiating with Apple or trying to salvage the existing codebase. I just walked away.

The combination of those two decisions—using AI as a force multiplier to build at an impossible pace, and being willing to burn down a platform dependency when it became a liability—gave NeutronTech something most startups at our stage don't have: a product that runs on Mac, Windows, iPad, and iPhone with zero dependency on any single ecosystem.

The unconventional part isn't any one decision. It's the willingness to move so fast and so independently that the conventional systems don't know what to do with you and then using that friction as fuel to build something better.

What’s something you wish you knew sooner that you’d give as advice for aspiring or newer entrepreneurs?

Three things I wish I'd known sooner:

First—build fast and break things, but build for the vision, not the room. When I got accepted into an accelerator, I lost focus. I started building for stakeholders instead of building the product. I was adjusting the roadmap to impress people in the room rather than solving the problem I set out to solve. It took me two months to get back on track, and the only thing that snapped me out of it was stripping away the noise and getting back to my faith and the original vision God gave me. If you're a founder and you feel yourself drifting—building decks more than product, optimizing for someone else's metrics—that's the signal to stop and recalibrate. The vision that got you here is the vision that gets you there.

Second—don't be afraid to make mistakes. Mistakes aren't the opposite of progress, they're the fastest path to it. Every bad architecture decision I made taught me something I couldn't have learned from a blog post or a course. The founders who win aren't the ones who avoid failure. They're the ones who recover from it faster than everyone else.

Third—build for what's coming, not just what's here. Everyone knows Apple dominates hardware-software interoperability. Their unified architecture is incredible and that's been their landscape from day one. But Windows is catching up fast. New NPUs, tighter OS and hardware integration, and a real push to compete with Apple's on-device capabilities are edging forward every day. Are they there yet? No. Will they fully close the gap? I'm not sure.

Microsoft is playing catch-up after three decades of prioritizing backwards compatibility over unified design. But that doesn't mean you can't build for what exists today and what will exist tomorrow. I made the decision to go cross-platform early, and that means NeutronTech is already positioned for wherever both ecosystems land. Too many founders build exclusively for the platform that's winning right now and get caught flat-footed when the landscape shifts.

Build for the trajectory, not the snapshot.

Want to dive deeper into Josh's work? Check out the links below!

• Visit NeutronTech's website: neutrontech.ai
• Visit Magnetar Mission's website: magnetarai.org
• Connect with Josh Hipp on LinkedIn: Josh Hipps
• Follow NeutronTech on LinkedIn: NeutronTech
• Subscribe to The Prophet Podcast: @thewarriorprophet
• Listen to The Prophet Podcast on Apple Podcasts: The Prophet Podcast