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Let's Build Your Fortress

Whether you're ready for a demo, have technical questions, or want to explore how Fortaleza AI fits your enterprise — we'd love to hear from you.

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Fill out the form and a member of our team will respond within one business day. For urgent inquiries, email us directly at [email protected].

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Meet the Team

Six co-founders with complementary expertise spanning business strategy, financial operations, enterprise marketing, talent management, infrastructure, and cybersecurity.

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CEO / President

Jeff DeKelver

Sets the company vision, leads fundraising and investor relations, drives revenue growth, and serves as the chief architect for the AI framework.

Strategy · Fundraising · AI Architecture
CEO / President

Jeff DeKelver

As the CEO and founder, Jeff's responsibilities include building out the long-term vision and strategy, setting the company direction, customer and investor relations, and serving as the chief architect for the AI framework. He has over 35 years of experience working in the technology field, for large and small companies as well as consulting, where he successfully introduced and implemented almost every technology out there.

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COO / CFO

Debra DeKelver

Oversees day-to-day operations and manages the financial strategy and planning of the company with decades of business management experience.

Operations · Financial Planning · Strategy
COO / CFO

Debra DeKelver

As the COO / CFO, Debra's responsibilities are to oversee the day-to-day operations and to manage the financial strategy and planning of the company. She has successfully run a home-based enterprise for over 30 years and brings a wealth of experience in organizing, planning, and executing on strategic goals. She also has extensive experience with medical practices and procedures.

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CMO

Becky Pasarell

Drives brand development, product marketing, communications, social media, and customer and channel acquisition strategies.

Marketing · Brand · Communications
CMO

Becky Pasarell

As the CMO, Becky's responsibilities are for the development and promotion of the Fortaleza brand, all of the product marketing, the communications and social media, and customer and channel acquisitions. She has over 8 years of experience working in underwriting for insurance, over 15 years of customer service, has published written works, worked professionally with digital media, and has multiple rendered art commissions.

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CPO / CHRO

Humberto Pasarell

Leads all talent acquisition, culture and engagement, compensation and benefits design, performance management, and compliance.

Talent · Culture · HR Operations
CPO / CHRO

Humberto Pasarell

As the CPO / CHRO, Humberto's responsibilities are for all talent acquisition, creation of the culture and engagement, all compensation, benefits, and performance management, and ensuring compliance. He has over 10 years in the recruitment industry, both agency and corporate, 7 of them in the technology industry.

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CISO

Jeffery D. DeKelver

Leads cybersecurity, compliance, and certification strategies. Creates risk management processes, incident response plans, and security culture.

Security · Compliance · Risk Management
CISO

Jeffery D. DeKelver

As the CISO, Jeffery's responsibilities are around the security, compliance, and certification strategies. He creates the risk management processes, the incident response plans, and builds out a security culture for Fortaleza. He has recently completed his degree in computer security, while also building out processes and plans for physical security, working with various state enforcement agencies, and being a former police officer.

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CTO

Ethan DeKelver

Builds out user experience, customer implementations, sets the technical vision, leads product development and infrastructure management.

Engineering · UX · Infrastructure
CTO

Ethan DeKelver

As the CTO, Ethan's responsibilities are building out the user experience, building out the customer implementations, setting the technical vision, the product development, and infrastructure management. He has a degree from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, and is currently a leader in his team, managing complex regulatory-based processes. He has led the initialization and implementation of new processes to improve efficiency for his entire division and completed a full redesign of a major application system.

Our Story

From a simple observation about the broken state of enterprise AI to a platform serving regulated industries worldwide.

2025

The Problem We Saw

Enterprises in healthcare, finance, and manufacturing were desperate for AI. But every solution on the market forced them to send sensitive data to someone else's cloud. HIPAA-bound hospitals couldn't use ChatGPT. SOX-regulated banks couldn't risk OpenAI APIs. The entire market was stuck in a false choice between powerful AI and data sovereignty.

2025

Six Founders, One Vision

Six professionals with complementary skills came together to build the solution the market was missing. Deep expertise in AI engineering, financial operations, enterprise marketing, talent management, IT infrastructure, and cybersecurity — all aligned around a single conviction: enterprise AI should run on enterprise infrastructure.

2025

The Platform Takes Shape

Built on proven open-source foundations — LangChain for agent orchestration, Ollama for local LLM inference, PostgreSQL, Redis, ChromaDB — the Fortaleza AI platform was architected from day one for on-premise deployment. No cloud dependencies. No external API calls. Every component containerized with Docker for enterprise distribution.

2026

Enterprise Security Layer

Added self-hosted Langfuse observability, LLM Guard input/output scanning, and NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails. The platform now offers complete audit trails, prompt injection detection, PII anonymization, and programmable conversation controls — making it the most security-conscious agentic AI platform available.

2026

Going to Market

With a production-ready platform, three pricing tiers, and a go-to-market strategy targeting regulated enterprises spending $50K–$500K annually on AI, Fortaleza AI is actively engaging healthcare systems, regional banks, manufacturers, and government agencies who need enterprise-grade AI without the enterprise cloud tax.

2026+

What's Next

Vertical-specific solutions for healthcare (EHR integration), financial services (core banking), and manufacturing (MES/SCADA). Kubernetes deployment at scale. A partner certification program. And a Series A to accelerate the mission: making enterprise AI truly enterprise-controlled.

Ready to talk? So are we.

Schedule a 30-minute call with our team. No pressure. No pitch deck. Just an honest conversation about your AI needs.

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