Built by engineers who think AI belongs on your machine
VirexaLLM was started by systems and ML engineers who were tired of watching confidential prompts leak into third-party inference pipelines. We set out to build the local runtime we wished existed — fast, private, cross-platform, and boring to install.
VirexaLLM at a glance
2022
Founded
By engineers tired of sending every prompt to someone else's datacenter
50+
Team Members
Systems, ML, and product — split across three continents
Millions
Local Inferences
Served on customer laptops — never touched our servers
Series B
Funding Stage
Backed by investors who bet on local-first infrastructure
The problem that would not go away
Powerful models exist, modern laptops can run them, and yet most teams still pipe every prompt to someone else's datacenter. We built VirexaLLM so developers and regulated teams can run open-weight models locally, with the same OpenAI-style API they already use — and no servers to call home to.
What we believe
The principles behind every product decision at VirexaLLM.
Ship fast, learn faster
We release the desktop app on a weekly cadence. Your feedback today ships in next Tuesday's build.
Private by default
No prompt ever leaves the device without explicit consent. Everything else is a failure of design.
Open weights, always
We only ship open-weight models. If you can't inspect a weight, you can't trust a model running on your machine.
Lightweight beats glamorous
A small, signed native binary will outrun a 4 GB Electron app every time. We pick the harder path.
Build for the developer
We design for the engineer running 12 Chrome tabs, Docker, and a model — not a stage demo.
Earn trust through releases
Reproducible builds, signed binaries, open core. We make it easy to verify we're telling the truth.
Leadership
CEO & Co-Founder
Former systems lead at a hyperscaler. Spent years trying to keep confidential prompts out of third-party inference pipelines.
CTO & Co-Founder
Ex-ML engineer who shipped on-device inference at a consumer OS vendor. Believes the best GPU is the one you already own.
VP Engineering
Scaled native app teams at multiple developer tools companies. Deep expertise in cross-platform runtimes and signed release pipelines.
VP Product
Two decades building developer tooling. Advocate for local-first, privacy-respecting, OpenAPI-compatible design.
We run on VirexaLLM ourselves
Our internal copilots, code review assistants, and document workflows all run against http://localhost:1775/v1 on laptops we own. When a release ships to customers, we've been using it for weeks.
Timeline
Company founded. First working local runtime running Llama 2 on an M1 MacBook shipped within three months.
Seed round closed. First 1,000 developers running production code against http://localhost:1775/v1.
Windows and Linux builds shipped. Signed installers and reproducible builds land in the release pipeline.
Series A. Curated model library launches with quantization recommendations tuned per hardware class.
Fleet admin console released. First regulated-industry customers deploy VirexaLLM on air-gapped workstations.
Series B. Team grows, model catalog expands, and on-device eval tooling ships to every customer.
Our team has roots at
Deep experience from leading systems, ML, and developer-tool companies.
Come build with us
We're hiring engineers, product thinkers, and go-to-market leaders who want to put powerful AI back on the hardware it runs best on.
Engineering
Cross-platform runtime, quantization pipelines, signed release tooling, and an on-device API server.
Product
Shape the model catalog, the chat UI, and the workflow surface developers actually want to live in.
Go-to-Market
Help developers, regulated enterprises, and agencies ship local-first AI instead of a cloud bill.
Your laptop is the server now
Download VirexaLLM and run Llama, Mistral, Phi-3, Gemma, or Qwen locally in minutes. Free desktop app for macOS, Windows, and Linux — your prompts never leave the device.