Varen Documentation

This is the reference for using Varen. If you're new, start with Getting Started. For background on what Varen is and how it's designed, read on. For marketing context and the full product overview, visit varen.au.

What is Varen?

Varen is a private ambient intelligence platform. It gives you access to specialist AI advisers across 14 domains — finance and tax, health, property, law, government, trades, travel, business, technology, education, writing, lifestyle, pets, and community — all working from a detailed, persistent understanding of your situation.

The defining characteristic of Varen is that your content stays on your own node — not in Varen's database, not accessible to Varen's systems. As Varen's design documents put it: "Not as a policy. As an architecture." The separation isn't a compliance posture or a setting you configure. The system is built so that your conversations, your uploaded files, and your knowledge base cannot reach Varen's infrastructure, because they never travel there in the first place.

The practical result is a platform that accumulates a detailed picture of your life — your finances, your health, your household, your work — and applies specialist knowledge to it, without any of that detail leaving your control.

Three levels of organisation

Varen organises everything into three levels: nodes, workspaces, and sessions. Understanding why the hierarchy exists — not just what each level is — makes the platform much easier to use effectively.

A node is a hardware instance running the Varen software. It could be a machine you own at home, a cloud host you control, or a Varen-hosted instance provisioned for your account. The node is where your data lives. All workspaces and sessions on a node are stored on that hardware.

A workspace is an isolated project or topic area. The isolation is intentional. Varen builds up a detailed picture of each workspace over time — the facts you've stated, the documents you've uploaded, the knowledge it has inferred. If all of that accumulated in one place, different areas of your life would contaminate each other. Your tax research would colour your health conversations. Your work planning would bleed into family decisions. Workspaces prevent this: nothing crosses between them.

A session is one conversation thread within a workspace. Sessions can be resumed at any point. Multiple sessions in the same workspace share the same knowledge base and files, but the conversation threads remain separate.

How to use these docs

If you're new to Varen, Getting Started walks you through your first login, adding a node, and starting your first conversation. After that, the guides cover each part of the platform in depth.

For existing users, use the sidebar to go directly to the relevant guide. Workspaces & Sessions covers how to organise your work. Chat & Advisers covers the conversation interface and how routing works. Knowledge & Profile explains how Varen's memory works. Files & Resources covers uploads and downloads. The Reference section covers adviser domains, billing, and privacy.

A note on privacy