Press
Desert Ant Labs builds high-performance, small AI models that run on device, instead of the cloud.
About
Desert Ant Labs is an on-device AI lab. It builds small, specialized models that run on a phone, a laptop, or in a browser rather than in a data center. Each model does one job: transcribe speech, clean up audio, find personal data in text, name the language being spoken, pick the clip worth posting.
The models ship with platform-native implementations for Swift, Kotlin, and JavaScript, and the weights are public on Hugging Face. The lab optimizes the models and the platform implementation together for the best performance on the device. Nothing a model reads leaves the device, there is no per-call cost, and every model is free up to 100,000 monthly active devices.
The lab is founded by the team behind Detail, Apple's iPad App of the Year in the 2025 App Store Awards, and the video platform Subwave. The models run in production in both. The three founders built Human, which Mapbox acquired in 2016, and the first generation of the Mapbox mobile SDKs.
Facts
- What we ship
- 12 models available today, 6 more in closed beta, across audio, text, and vision.
- How we build them
- We train, fine-tune, and rebuild each model end to end for the device. We optimize our models and the platform implementation for the best performance on their tasks.
- Where it runs
- On the device: iOS, macOS, Android, Linux, Windows, the browser, and Node. No inference server, and nothing uploaded.
Independent research
- Local LLMs can already answer 88.7% of real-world queries, and local accelerators run the same model 1.4x more efficiently than cloud hardware.Intelligence per Watt, Stanford, 2026
- 7.4 billion smartphones are in active use.Counterpoint Research, 2026
- The hyperscalers are spending about $450 billion a year on AI data centers.Goldman Sachs, 2026
Models
- Voz Transcribe on an iPhone, every word timestamped. 30 minutes of audio in 6s on an iPhone 17 Pro, at a 7.40% word error rate against 7.00% for Whisper large-v3-turbo, from 467MB instead of 1.6GB.
- Clear Studio sound from a phone recording in seconds. A 5-minute clip enhanced, mastered, and re-encoded in 1s on an iPhone 16 Pro, 302x realtime.
- Uhm Find and cut every filler word. An hour of audio in 12s on an iPhone 17 Pro, 296x realtime.
- Redact Hide personal data before it leaves the device. 88.8% recall across 27 languages, from an 11.6MB model that runs in a browser tab.
- Tongue Name the language from three words. 0.933 macro F1 from 2MB, against 0.887 for a 293MB detector.
Brand assets
The company
- Registered as
- Desert Ant Labs B.V.
- Founded
- August 2026
- Founders
- Paul Veugen (CEO), Laurier Rochon (CTO), Fredrik Wallin (Engineering)
- Chamber of Commerce (KvK)
- 42136051
- Headquarters
- Amsterdam, the Netherlands