A LITTLE DIFFERENT LOOK AT THE WORLD.
Upside Down Research — Engineered Software —
Est. MMXXIII
No. I.
Statement of the Firm

Upside Down Research, LLC

Upside Down Research, LLC builds SaaS products, and takes on custom development, for people who need software to be correct under pressure. We focus on delivering substance over superficiality.

Our products include Housecarl Arbiter, our flagship formal reasoning engine; Housecarl AuthZ, an authorization service sold for on-prem deployment by platform teams; and Housecarl Tupshar, an AI-native knowledge base and document store (research preview).

Arbiter productized the last 50 years of research on reasoning under uncertainty into an advanced reasoner suitable for wide use: it weighs conflicting sources by reliability and recency, keeps the disagreements visible instead of averaging them away, and returns a verdict you can trace back to the evidence. Housecarl AuthZ is one of the most advanced authorization systems in commercial play today.

News, technical writing, and other updates are available at the writing section. The latest writing is about our software stack.

Please reach out at hello@upside-down-research.com for further discussion. Alternatively, consider booking a call with the founder.

Thank you,
Paul Nathan,
Founder

No. II.
The Catalog

Products in Service.

Three products in service. Each carries a published specification; terms are fixed in writing before signature.
Housecarl Arbiter mark
UDR-HC-02
In Service

Housecarl Arbiter

reasoner

Weighs conflicting sources by reliability and recency, and returns a verdict you can audit.

Housecarl Arbiter productizes the last fifty years of research on reasoning under uncertainty into an advanced reasoner suitable for wide use. Built by UDR; available self-serve, from a free tier upward.

You supply the sources, claims, and evidence; the engine supplies the weighing. Each source carries a reliability score and a decay rate, so a regulatory filing outweighs an anonymous post and a stale claim loses force on a published schedule. Repetition is not counted as corroboration. Where the evidence genuinely conflicts, the engine enumerates every coherent reading rather than averaging them into one, and scores each.

Outputs are a scored verdict, a ranked claim list, and an interpretation tree that traces every conclusion back to the sources, weights, and timestamps behind it. Reproducible, and fit for record.

Arbiter measures sources against what they say; it does not adjudicate the world. If a source is wrong, Arbiter is wrong with it.

Specification
ReleaseRolling
HostingGCP · us-central1
SLO99% uptime
InterfacesMCP · API
InputsSources · claims · evidence
OutputScored verdict · interpretation tree
LicenseCommercial
Housecarl mark
UDR-HC-01
Operational

Housecarl

AuthZ

Policy-as-contract authorization for production services.

Housecarl is one of the most advanced AuthZ systems in commercial play today. Policies match by string, prefix, regex, or glob. Domains compose into a lattice with diamond inheritance — every child inherits from every superior. Multi-tenant isolation is fluid: cross-tenant requests evaluate against the target tenant's policies, not the caller's. Sessions are signed, keys revocable, passwords hashed. No sidecars required.

Deploys on Kubernetes or Linux, on infrastructure the customer owns. Sold under direct commercial terms; evaluate it in the hosted demo environment. Interfaces: gRPC and REST.

Specification
Releasev1.0.0-prerelease
Deploys onKubernetes · Linux
HostingGCP · us-central1
InterfacesgRPC · REST
LicenseCommercial
Tupshar mark
UDR-RES-01
Research Preview

Housecarl Tupshar

knowledge base

AI-native structured knowledge base and document store for LLM systems.

Specification
ReleaseResearch preview
HostingGCP · us-central1
InterfacesREST · MCP
SearchBM25 full-text
StoragePlaintext documents
PriceFree during preview