About
Philterd is the open source company behind self-hosted PII and PHI redaction for healthcare, finance, legal, government, and AI workloads. We build the software, maintain the models, and support the deployments.
Founder
Jeff founded Philterd in 2017 after watching commercial privacy tools turn into proprietary black boxes. He designed and built every component of the Philterd open source toolkit: Phileas, Philter, PhEye, Phinder, Phield, Philter AI Proxy, Philter Scope, Philter Diffuse, and the Redaction Policy Editor. Every product is released under the Apache 2.0 license.
Jeff serves as PMC Chair of Apache OpenNLP and is a member of the Apache Software Foundation. He brings 20+ years of experience in software engineering, search, NLP, and data privacy across healthcare, financial services, government, and AI.
When you work with Philterd, you work directly with the person who wrote the code. Your data never leaves your perimeter, the source is yours to audit and extend, and contributors and operators shape the roadmap.
Philterd was founded by Jeff Zemerick after watching commercial privacy tools turn into proprietary black boxes: APIs that required sending sensitive data to the cloud just to redact it. We believed there was a better way.
We started by building Phileas as an open source library: auditable, embeddable, and free for anyone to use. It was the proof that privacy software didn't have to be opaque. The library quickly grew into the engine behind Philter, the enterprise-grade redaction API used today by healthcare, legal, and financial organizations.
Unlike vendors that wrap third-party APIs and resell the result, we own the models, the runtime, and the policy engine. Every component of the Philterd ecosystem is engineered in-house and released under Apache 2.0: code you can read, audit, and extend.
When you email us, you reach the engineers who wrote the line of code in question. No outsourced support tier, no ticket triage gauntlet. Just direct access to the maintainers.
Led by the PMC Chair of Apache OpenNLP, an Apache Software Foundation Member, and 15+ years of production NLP work. The models behind Philterd are built by the people who build the frameworks underneath them.
Every product we ship runs entirely inside your perimeter. No outbound API calls, no third-party data sharing, no surprise pricing changes. The architecture isn't a marketing choice. It's a structural commitment to the original principle.
Philter and the rest of the Philterd toolkit run inside your own environment, whether that is your cloud, your own servers, or your desktop. Your data stays in your perimeter, never reaches a third-party API, and never lands in someone else's logs.
Transparency is the only way to verify privacy software. Our core engine is Apache 2.0 licensed, so your engineers can read every line, audit every decision, and extend the stack on their own terms.
Generic LLMs make poor privacy filters. We train and ship specialized NLP and deep-learning models built specifically for PII and PHI detection. They are accurate, tunable, and operationally affordable at scale.
We are always excited to hear from people who share our passion for data privacy and open source software. If you are interested in working with us, please send your resume to careers@philterd.ai.
Work directly with the creators of Philter to design and deploy PII redaction systems for your stack.
Ask questions, report bugs, share redaction policies, and connect with other Philterd users on GitHub.
Have a question or want to discuss a project? Reach out and we will get back to you within one business day.