About Four Boots
We come from the hardest room
Four Boots started in healthcare technology: FHIR platform architecture, clinical AI, mental-health digital therapeutics. Software where a mistake isn't a bad user review — it's a compliance incident or a patient harmed. HIPAA, SOC 2, audit trails, and human accountability weren't aspirations; they were the entry fee.
It turns out that discipline is exactly what agentic AI is missing
When we started building AI agents for other industries, we brought the clinical habits with us: every side effect approved by a human before it happens, every action recorded in an append-only audit log, deterministic logic wherever correctness matters and the model confined to judgment calls. Most AI vendors bolt guardrails on at the end. We can't imagine starting without them.
We've shipped it twice, in industries nobody calls "tech"
For a major streaming studio's TV production, we built a wardrobe-intelligence copilot: it reads a screenplay and produces scene-by-scene breakdowns, fabric-specified shopping briefs, continuity alerts, and customs manifests from photos of packed cases. For a recruiting firm, we built an AI-native applicant tracking system: it opens each morning by telling the recruiter which candidates are stuck and why, drafts the follow-ups, and sends nothing without a click of approval.
Different industries, same chassis — a model-agnostic harness that runs across AI providers, so our clients are never hostage to one vendor's roadmap or pricing. That harness is now a repeatable offering: we can build one for your industry.
And the humans are still in the building
Alongside the engineering practice, we run a creative team producing content and growth for startups — people with taste using AI for speed, not AI replacing the people. The same conviction runs through everything we ship: AI does the work; humans set the direction and take the accountability.
Founder-led, on purpose
Four Boots is founder-led. When you book a Strategy Session, you talk to the engineer who architects and ships the systems — not an account manager. That's an advantage we intend to keep.
The team
Founder & principal engineer
Stayce Cavanaugh
Stayce has spent twenty-five years showing up early to things before they had names: VOIP on Wall Street in 1999, Ruby on Rails before version 1.0, shipping iPhone apps in 2008, women's-health software in 2010 — and now AI-native healthcare. Most of that time sits where software meets healthcare data: EHR and EMR integration, HL7 and FHIR, HIPAA, and wearables.
She spent six years at Google, bookended by two acquisitions. As Tech Lead at Wildfire — the social-marketing platform Google acquired for $350 million — she led the Templates team and owned the data platform serving 16,000+ B2B customers, including 30 of the Fortune 50. On YouTube TV, she built the search and keyboard experience used by more than two billion people across 2,000+ device types. And inside Google's Area 120 incubator she co-founded Chatbase — the first analytics platform for conversational AI — scaled it to 120,000+ bots and 100 million messages a month with clients like American Airlines and HBO, and led the engineering team through its acquisition by Google Cloud, one of Area 120's most successful exits. She was measuring why conversational AI fails years before "chatbot" meant LLM — which is roughly the job description of a harness builder.
Since Google she has co-founded healthcare startups — MedSeal, a FHIR-native platform for making patient health data portable across providers, and Kuma Health, a venture-backed chronic-inflammatory-disease platform built at Zinc VC — and served as interim CTO for others, including MYNDY. FHIR platforms across the Four Boots portfolio now process more than 900 patients a week. And in an earlier life she bootstrapped a custom leather accessories brand stocked in more than 120 retailers — including Urban Outfitters and Fred Segal — so the wardrobe harness wasn't the first time she shipped product for the fashion world.
The studio's creative bench scales per engagement — and every piece of work ships with a human's name on it.