Ontic, LLC
We build privacy-first software grounded in information security and behavioral psychology — tools that give people control over their own experience, never extract it.
About
Most technology is designed to capture attention. We build the opposite: small, thoughtful software that strengthens the relationship between people and their own choices.
Founded by practitioners with deep information security backgrounds. Privacy isn't a policy — it's an architectural decision baked in from day one.
Our products are informed by behavioral psychology research, not engagement metrics. We design for long-term human flourishing, not short-term retention.
We measure success by how much control users gain over their lives — not by time-on-app, data collected, or addictive loops engineered.
Every product decision is traceable to established research. We don't design by intuition alone — we build on evidence from peer-reviewed behavioral science.
Products
Each product solves a real problem with the minimum footprint necessary.
A privacy-first digital wellness program that helps you understand and reshape your relationship with screens and social media. 52 research-backed lessons, 7 interactive exercises, built on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. No subscription, no data collection, no algorithm fighting you. $1.
Visit digitalbalance.app →Team
Sylvia Olveda
Co-Founder
Sylvia holds two psychology degrees from Stanford, where she served as a Teaching Assistant for Philip Zimbardo — the researcher whose work on situational control, compliance, and how environments shape behavior became foundational to everything we now understand about influence at scale.
She wasn't just reading Zimbardo. She was inside the room, translating his research for students and working directly with his methods. That experience gave her a practitioner's understanding of how environments — not individual willpower — determine behavior.
From there, Sylvia moved into user experience research — the discipline where behavioral psychology meets product design. UX research asks why people behave the way they do inside digital systems, and how those systems should be built to actually serve human needs. It's work that sits at the uncomfortable intersection of cognitive science and commercial software, and Sylvia spent years in that space.
What she saw there wasn't encouraging. The same psychological principles she'd studied at Stanford — reward variability, social proof, loss aversion, identity-based compliance — were being baked into interfaces not to help users, but to keep them. Not as a side effect. As the product.
Digital Balance is built on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, a framework that treats compulsive behavior not as weakness but as a predictable response to a poorly designed environment. That framing is Sylvia's. When a platform is engineered to exploit your cognition, understanding your own mind matters more than trying to out-willpower it.
Ryan Shanahan
Co-Founder
Ryan is an information security professional with a background as a CISO. He spent years studying how adversaries exploit cognitive vulnerabilities — phishing, social engineering, pretexting — and eventually noticed that the same psychological levers being used in targeted attacks were being deployed at population scale by social media platforms.
The difference: social engineering attacks are illegal. Persuasive design is a business model.
Digital Balance emerged from that observation. Ryan brings a security mindset to digital wellness — treating attention capture as an adversarial problem worth defending against, not just a lifestyle inconvenience to manage. The program is built around that premise: the platforms aren't neutral, and you deserve to understand what they're actually doing.
Contact
Questions about our products, press inquiries, or just want to talk shop — reach out.
We respond to every message personally.
team@onticllc.com