Who we are
We are a small, remote group of engineers and designers who have each spent long enough on someone else's cloud to know it's not the only way. Between us there's work at open-source runtimes, a couple of model teams, and a lot of years of building native apps that people actually keep on their phones.
We don't have a CEO-of-the-month photo page. We don't have a 60-slide deck on synergy. What we have is a shared conviction that the best AI you'll use in a given week is the one sitting an inch from your face, ready before you finish the thought — and that conviction is enough to shape every decision we make.
Our mission
To put real, useful AI on the device you already own, without attaching it to a subscription, a login, or a pipe to someone else's server.
The incumbents will tell you that the future of AI is a rented conversation, billed by the token, with your context stored indefinitely on machines you don't control. We disagree. We think the future of AI looks a lot like the future of the camera: capable, quiet, local, and so tightly integrated that you stop thinking about where the compute happens.
Nimbus8 is our attempt to ship that future one iPhone at a time.
Principles
- Local by default. The network is off until you turn it on. Models live on disk, inference runs on your silicon, chats stay in the app's sandbox.
- No accounts. You should not need to prove who you are to talk to software you own.
- Open weights, curated. We don't train proprietary models — we pick, tune, and verify the open ones. The catalog is opinionated; the choice is yours.
- Quiet surfaces. No streaks, no nudges, no "You haven't talked to Claude today." The app should be a place to think, not a game to play.
- Privacy without ceremony. Compliance checklists are a symptom, not the goal. If nothing leaves the device, a lot of the ceremony melts away.
How Nimbus8 got made
The first prototype was a pair of weekend hacks: a Swift wrapper around llama.cpp that streamed tokens into a chat view, and a tiny launcher for picking which model to run. It was bad and slow and we kept using it anyway, because every query felt like ours again.
A year later, the "bad and slow" parts have given way to a proper runtime — MLX for Apple Silicon, GGUF via llama.cpp for broader coverage, Core ML for vision and audio — and the single chat view has grown into eight focused modules named after different kinds of weather. The through-line hasn't changed: we want the software you open when you don't want to think about the internet.
What we don't do
- We don't collect analytics. Not even anonymous ones.
- We don't sell your data. (It's not on any server of ours to sell.)
- We don't run a chat log through a moderation proxy. The only code that sees your conversation is the model you picked and the iOS text view.
- We don't ship features we wouldn't use ourselves for a week first.
- We don't charge per token.
Press & brand
A press kit with the Nimbus8 logo, module marks, and screenshots will be available the day the app is live on the App Store. Journalists and reviewers can reach us at the address below in the meantime and we'll be happy to get you early access.
Brand basics, in the meantime: the wordmark is Nimbus8 (one word, capital N, the 8 is a numeral — not "Nimbus 8" or "Nimbus Eight"). The cloud mark is always the smiling face. The primary palette is called Vanilla Wood and that's not negotiable.
Contact
Press, partnership, or "hey, how does this thing actually work" questions: support@driftrail.com. We read it and we answer within a few days. There's no support AI on the other end; just the team.