NewSovereign AI: private AI infrastructure on hardware you rent or own, fully managed.
NewSovereign AI: private AI infrastructure on hardware you rent or own, fully managed.
Oct 29, 2026
Written by: Hoonify
A trafficking ad goes live tonight. By tomorrow it’s gone, the phone number has changed, and the trafficker has moved the victim to another city. So the window to act is hours, and the people racing that clock are analysts. This is how on-prem HPC gave them their time back.
DeliverFund’s analysts build the intelligence that more than 500 law enforcement agencies use to find victims and arrest traffickers. Until recently, though, their time went to sorting raw data. Hoonify gave it back. With TurbOS clusters running on hardware DeliverFund owns, the machines now do the first pass, and analysts start where the real work begins.
Human trafficking in the U.S. is mostly a domestic crime. “Eighty percent of the human trafficking victims in our country are US citizens being trafficked by other US citizens,” says Shane Erickson, DeliverFund’s Chief of Operations and a former Montana detective supervisor.
The people chasing traffickers are stretched thin. Nearly half of U.S. law enforcement agencies have fewer than 10 sworn officers. As a result, most can’t staff a trafficking unit, let alone an intelligence team. “We don’t have enough law enforcement and we don’t have enough prosecutors,” Erickson says.
DeliverFund fills that gap. Founded in 2014 by Nic McKinley, a former Air Force pararescueman and CIA officer, it puts trained analysts with counterterrorism and cybercrime backgrounds alongside police departments. They build target packages for live operations, map trafficking networks, and track traffickers across jurisdictions using P.A.T.H., the organization’s AI-driven database of illicit advertising. When traffickers DeliverFund helped identify have gone to trial, the conviction rate has been 100%.
Every one of those cases starts with data. And the data never stops.
DeliverFund’s collectors pulled trafficking ads and related data from across the web, running in the public cloud. However, as volume grew, three problems compounded.
Collection couldn’t keep up. Traffickers post, edit, and delete ads around the clock. Slow collection meant evidence disappeared before collectors could capture it, and reports reached investigators later than they should have.
Analysts did the machine’s job. Before any real analysis, people had to sort and triage raw material by hand. In other words, every hour spent there was an hour not spent building a case.
The cloud was the wrong home for this data. This is evidence of crimes against real people, including children. Instead, it belongs on infrastructure DeliverFund controls. Also, for a nonprofit, every cloud bill is donor money that isn’t funding another analyst.
DeliverFund needed more compute, on its own hardware, that never goes down, at a cost a nonprofit could carry.
Hoonify’s leadership spent their careers as engineers building supercomputers at Sandia National Laboratories and Cray Research. So they brought the same approach to DeliverFund: take the hardware already in the building and make it work like one machine.
TurbOS turned DeliverFund’s everyday machines into HPC clusters. No new data center and no rip-and-replace.
DeliverFund’s existing collectors moved over as-is. Then TurbOS schedules them across every available node at once, alongside AI and machine learning jobs, and keeps the hardware at 100% utilization. More than 10 million applications have run since installation.
Hoonify built a multi-site, high-availability configuration. If one site goes down, the work moves and keeps running. Traffickers don’t keep business hours, and now neither does DeliverFund’s intelligence pipeline.
Everything runs on-prem. As a result, sensitive case data stays on hardware DeliverFund owns, and costs stay flat no matter how much data comes in.
“Partnering with Hoonify was one of the best decisions we ever made at DeliverFund. As a nonprofit, we must always be vigilant in spending our donors’ money wisely.”Sean Fennema, Co-Founder and President, DeliverFund
Collection runs five times faster, so collectors capture ads before they vanish. After the collectors moved to on-prem HPC, the trafficking evidence DeliverFund collected each month rose 1,179%.
That evidence then turns into intelligence. DeliverFund went from 400 reports a year to more than 600, each one a package an agency can act on.
Most importantly, the analysts got their time back. With TurbOS doing the first pass, DeliverFund cut its initial analyst load by more than 90%. Because of that, the people with counterterrorism and cybercrime training now spend their hours on targeting, network mapping, and supporting live operations.
“We can reduce our initial analyst load by more than 90%. Our future is all the brighter thanks to Hoonify’s involvement.”Sean Fennema, President, DeliverFund
A small police department can’t hire an intelligence team. Instead, DeliverFund is that team for hundreds of them. When its analysts get nine of every ten triage hours back, that time goes straight into the cases those departments couldn’t build alone.
It means a target package lands while the ad is still live. Analysts map a network before it moves. And investigators find a victim sooner.
The partnership earned Hoonify the New Mexico Technology Council’s 2024 Flying 40 Award for Technology for Good.
Hoonify CEO Andrew Clark said it’s the reason the company exists: to put national lab computing power in the hands of teams doing critical work on tight budgets.
Defense, intelligence, and law enforcement teams face the same problem DeliverFund did: more data than people, and data too sensitive for someone else’s cloud. Hoonify runs on-prem HPC and AI on hardware you own, air-gapped if needed, fully managed by national lab engineers.
Hoonify helps companies run AI and HPC they own, control, and trust, from our cloud to their air-gapped data center. Founded by engineers from Sandia National Laboratories and Cray, the team brings 100+ years of combined national lab experience to defense, energy, aerospace, and life sciences.
Hoonify runs AI and HPC for organizations that can’t afford to get it wrong. Our founders come from Cray and Sandia National Laboratories, and our team brings more than 100 years of national lab engineering to every system we build. We learned our standards in places where a wrong answer is worse than no answer: national labs, defense programs, energy research, and life sciences. For five years, we’ve run TurbOS, our HPC software, in production for customers including Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories. Now we bring that same discipline to AI. Customers choose Sovereign AI, Sovereign HPC, or both, fully managed by our engineers. They can start in our cloud and move on-prem or air-gapped when they’re ready, with open models, standard APIs, and no lock-in along the way. You keep the data, the hardware, and the roadmap. We keep it running.
