How Athena Intelligence gained access to customers in regulated markets

About

Athena Intelligence builds an AI agent platform for enterprise automation. The company serves the advisory and consulting industry, along with financial services and healthcare. All these sectors have heavy compliance requirements where private cloud or on-premise deployment is often mandatory. Without deployment flexibility, entire market segments would be inaccessible.

The problem

Brendon Geils, founder of Athena Intelligence, spent years evaluating workflow orchestration platforms. The blocker was always deployment: could it run in a customer's environment? In an on-premise data center? Embedded into another product?

"I had tested every product on the market. There was not very many products that were willing to be deployed on private clouds, self-hosted, on-prem, embedded."

— Brendon Geils, Founder

Most workflow companies built SaaS products where multi-tenancy was baked into their business model. Self-hosting was an afterthought. But for Athena, this blocked access to their entire target market. Major consulting firms won't route sensitive client data through third-party SaaS. Healthcare companies face HIPAA requirements. Financial services have data sovereignty policies.

"We would never go with a vendor that wouldn't make that possible in one, two, three years time because it's like putting all your eggs in a basket and then at scale you can actually never deploy that basket into the facilities that we want."

— Brendon Geils

The workflow engine was foundational. Getting it wrong meant either abandoning regulated markets or facing expensive re-architecture later. Hatchet was too unstable. Airflow was too low-level without a UI. Most platforms treated self-hosting as an afterthought with poor documentation.

The solution

Windmill supported cloud, self-hosted, on-premise, and embedded deployments as core capabilities, not afterthoughts. The open-source foundation meant Athena could verify deployment feasibility before committing, which is critical for enterprise IT reviews.

"Everything worked out of the box. It was easy for me to learn. The technical people on our team took to it really quickly."

— Brendon Geils

For a platform company, reliability was existential. When infrastructure embedded in a customer-facing product fails, it's Athena's reputation on the line.

"When I get woken up at night because something is on fire, it's never due to Windmill. Windmill is actually one of the most stable parts of our business, so we can quickly focus on identifying and fixing the real issue."

— Brendon Geils

The documentation covered edge cases other platforms hadn't anticipated: network segmentation, identity provider integration, resource constraints. This reduced the deployment friction that kills enterprise deals.

How it works

When Athena's AI agent encounters a task it can't handle, customers write a custom script. The agent helps write the code, the script is saved in Windmill, and it becomes a new tool the agent invokes automatically.

"Our primary use case is the script capability. Our agent has a set of built-in tools, but whenever we need something new, customers build a custom script. The agent can help them write the code, and then that script becomes a new tool in the agent's toolkit."

— Brendon Geils

For enterprise customers, Windmill runs embedded within Athena's platform in their own infrastructure. Windmill is invisible infrastructure underneath, executing scripts within their security perimeter.

# Example: Consulting firm writes this compliance check once
# Script runs in their environment with their data

def check_compliance(company_id: str, review_year: int):
    records = fetch_records(company_id, review_year)
    compliance_score = calculate_compliance(records)
    return {
        "score": compliance_score,
        "status": "compliant" if compliance_score > 0.95 else "review_needed"
    }

# AI agent invokes this automatically - data never leaves customer infrastructure

Athena's customers write custom Python scripts that run securely within their own infrastructure.

The result

Athena is now deploying to major regulated enterprise customers that require private cloud infrastructure and would be inaccessible with a SaaS-only platform.

After nearly a year in production, Windmill serves dozens of customer organizations running 24/7 automation. The infrastructure has proven rock-solid.

"Windmill ranks among the most stable components of our infrastructure for performance, cost, scaling, uptime."

— Brendon Geils

Deployment flexibility unlocked access to regulated markets:

• Audit, advisory and consulting firms requiring private cloud with data residency guarantees
• Financial services with on-premise mandates for sensitive data processing
• Healthcare organizations needing HIPAA-compliant infrastructure
• Government contractors with air-gapped network requirements
• Fortune 500 customers who choose Athena specifically for its compliance and security posture

Each market has substantial budgets and long-term contracts but is only accessible to vendors whose infrastructure can deploy into their environments.

Why this matters for platform companies

For companies serving regulated industries, deployment flexibility determines market access. Athena spent years searching for a workflow platform that could unlock these markets. Not for more features, but for architectural flexibility that could scale across deployment environments while maintaining production reliability.

The lesson for platform companies and ISVs: choose foundational technology based on the markets you want to access three years from now, not just the customers you can sign today.

Conclusion

Athena Intelligence's story reveals a simple truth: for platform companies targeting regulated industries, deployment flexibility isn't a feature, it's market access. SaaS-only tools lock you out of audit firms, financial services, and healthcare. Self-hosting as an afterthought creates deployment friction that kills enterprise deals.

Windmill's open-source foundation, production stability, and enterprise-ready documentation solved this. After years evaluating workflow platforms, Athena found infrastructure they could confidently build on and deploy wherever customers required. Today, they're winning enterprise deals their competitors can't even pursue.