About Northwise

I built Northwise because I got tired of asking other architects to put their work somewhere useful.

At Athlon, I spent years trying to make architecture governance work with combinations of Confluence spaces, modelling exports, and Excel decision logs that went stale the moment they were published. When a team asked "does architecture need to review this?" the answer was usually "let me check with someone" rather than "the system will route it to the right person." When a principle was written, it lived in a document nobody linked to. When drift happened, nobody knew until a deployment broke something.

The expensive EA tools were built for Fortune 500 consultants at €200-400 per seat. The free alternatives were glorified diagram editors that stored nothing structured. The mid-market was unserved.

So I started building the tool I needed: one that takes ArchiMate seriously as a metamodel (not just a drawing language), prices for teams of 5-50 architects without per-viewer fees, and automates the parts of governance that currently fall through the cracks — Git scanning, AI-authored principles, automatic review routing.

Northwise is the result. Opinionated where it should be — the metamodel, the deliverable structure, the decision routing. Flexible where it matters — your LLM key, your tenant configuration, your responsibility matrix.

— Yori Hak
Enterprise Architect + founder, Northwise