Copenhagen-based AI company NobodyWho has secured €2 million in pre-seed funding to develop technology that allows artificial intelligence models to run directly on smartphones and laptops, without relying on cloud infrastructure.

The funding round was led by Nordic early-stage investors PSV Tech and The Footprint Firm, with additional participation from Norrsken Evolve. The investment will support the company’s work on Small Language Models (SLMs), which are designed to operate locally on devices rather than through remote servers.

While most large language models currently depend on cloud-based systems, this approach often involves high computing costs, energy use and the transfer of sensitive data to external servers. NobodyWho is taking an alternative route by keeping AI processing on the device, enabling offline use and giving users full control over their data.

“While the rest of the world is racing to build ever-growing LLMs based on a bigger-is-better approach, we believe the next leap forward in AI will come from making models smaller, local, and human-centric. The future of AI won’t be won by size, but by decentralised models that anyone can run on their own devices,” said co-founder and CEO Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm.

NobodyWho was founded by Falkenstrøm, an entrepreneur and artist, alongside co-founder and chief technology officer Asbjørn Olling. The company’s engine enables developers to fine-tune and deploy SLMs directly inside mobile and desktop applications, even without specialist experience in large language models.

Explaining the motivation behind the platform, the founders told TFN, “The challenge was that most developers want to build with LLMs without needing deep LLM expertise. NobodyWho exists to make that possible, while supporting data sovereignty, reducing costs and energy use, and removing dependency on centralised cloud infrastructure.”

By keeping data on the device, the company says its technology delivers privacy by design and supports data sovereignty. It also addresses the environmental impact associated with training and running large cloud-based models, which can carry significant energy demands and carbon emissions.

According to early benchmarks shared by the company, its local-first SLM architecture can deliver up to 100 times lower training footprint and up to 500 times lower inference footprint compared with traditional large-scale models. The company argues that shrinking model size and placing computation closer to the user significantly reduces energy consumption.

More than 5,000 developers are already using NobodyWho’s open-source SLM engine. The company positions itself as an alternative to major AI providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, competing instead on privacy, energy efficiency and European AI sovereignty.

Addressing questions around diversity, the company said, “We’re a small and growing team, led by a female founder and CEO. As we scale, we’re actively focused on building a diverse and inclusive team across both technical and commercial roles.”

The newly raised capital will be used to further develop the company’s technology and expand adoption of on-device AI across Europe. The founders added, “We want to make NobodyWho a core infrastructure for local AI and follow an alternative path to cloud-based AI by providing open-source fast, private, and cost-efficient local LLMs – and helping position Europe as a global leader in on-device AI.”

Investors backing the round highlighted the company’s focus on sustainability and privacy. Christel Piron, co-founder and General Partner at PSV Tech, said, “Backing NobodyWho was a no-brainer for us: this is an exceptional team building critical European AI infrastructure that is privacy-protecting, energy-efficient, and accessible to developers and companies everywhere – exactly the kind of technology PSV Tech exists to support and we want to see scale from the Nordics.”

Sofie Käll, CIO at The Footprint Firm, added, “By enabling high-performance SLMs to run directly on users’ devices, they significantly reduce the carbon footprint of AI inference while enhancing data privacy, lowering operational costs, and strengthening European AI sovereignty. NobodyWho is pioneering the infrastructure that makes these ultra-efficient models truly plug-and-play for developers. This is a transformative climate-tech opportunity in one of the fastest-growing emissions categories, and we’re excited to support a team capable of moving the industry toward more responsible AI.”