The businesses with the most to protect have the least control.
Main Street USA owns its trucks, its tools, and its building. Silicon Valley decided the AI should be different.
We are watching it get sold Silicon Valley's version of AI. Subscriptions you'll never own, tools that assume an engineering team you don't have, and fine print that quietly turns your customer data into someone else's asset.
Primare is an AI operations company built the other way around. You own the hardware. You own your data. You own the intelligence the system builds about your business, because it came from you.
We show up, install it on-site anywhere in the continental U.S., build it around how you actually operate, and we stay. If your business is the kind that gets called when something breaks (a system, a smile, a booking, a deal), we built Primare for you.
Primare is founded and run by co-founders Jonathan Kirkland and JW Kirkland.
If renting your software has never bothered you, nothing on this page will. If you would rather own it, that is a 30-minute conversation.
Primare is a father-and-son company.
Jonathan Kirkland
Co-Founder
Leads engineering. Builds the machine.
Jonathan Kirkland is co-founder of Primare AI and leads engineering. Every Primare P1 that ships is his build, from the hardware to the models on it to the way it learns a business.
He began his career in drug discovery, building the software infrastructure behind a high-throughput screening platform for novel cancer therapeutics that encoded and decoded millions of samples in parallel. He is now a PhD candidate at the University of California, San Diego, developing deep learning models that predict disease risk from the microbiome. His published work spans machine learning, the microbiome, and pediatric cancer, including a 2026 paper in Nature Communications on applying AI to precision nutrition.
Jonathan brings a decade of software development and large-scale compute experience, along with working expertise in deep learning and large language models, to Primare's product development and deployment.
JW Kirkland
Co-Founder
Leads operations. Makes sure it holds up at a real front desk.
JW Kirkland is co-founder of Primare AI, an AI operations company that builds private AI systems for small and mid-sized businesses and runs them on hardware those businesses own. The system is installed on-site, what it learns about the business stays in the building, and Primare maintains and supports it after deployment.
JW leads the operating side of the company, from the first conversation about what a business actually needs through deployment and the ongoing relationship that follows. His co-founder and son, Jonathan Kirkland, leads engineering. JW's role is to make sure what they build holds up at a real front desk, not just in a demo.
In the 1990s, he co-founded Encore Tickets in Atlanta, a ticket brokerage that later merged into PrimeSport, now part of On Location. In the 2000s, he ran a financial trading firm in the United States and China with more than 500 equity traders.
He has built and marketed his own companies digitally for more than twenty years, in both the United States and China, and began providing digital marketing services to other businesses in 2012. He later operated a 300-person team in the Philippines supporting marketing agencies and their clients.
In November 2022, he and his son began building AI systems for businesses. They founded Primare AI in 2026.
JW did not come up through a large corporation. He has spent his working life building and running small and mid-sized businesses, and those are the businesses Primare is built for.
He splits his work time between Austin and San Diego.
When you buy a system from us, those are the names accountable for it.
The person on your discovery call is one of them.