The tool is designed to keep sensitive information secure and prevent data breaches.
Nagu Gopalakrishnan, co-founder and chief product and technology officer at 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.
“Stirling 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.”
Unlike many AI security tools that rely on cloud servers, Stirling-Minimo PII runs locally on standard office hardware.
It has a file size of roughly 40MB and operates with 10 million parameters, allowing it to run efficiently on ordinary CPUs or edge devices without the need for specialist equipment.
By processing data within an organisation’s own infrastructure, the model helps companies comply with GDPR and data residency requirements while eliminate the security risks of sending raw data to external providers.
Despite its compact design, Stirling-Minimo PII has achieved strong industry recognition.
It scored 0.904 on the PIIMB English benchmark and is ranked third out of 36 global models on the public leaderboard, alongside models with more than 100 times as many parameters.
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.”
The model has attracted praise from across Scotland’s tech and business sectors.
Richard Lochhead, former Scottish Government minister for business, said: “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 the tool addresses a major concern for business leaders considering AI adoption.
He 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, added: “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.
“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 now available for non-commercial use on Hugging Face under a CC BY-NC 4.0 licence.
