OpenMind Integrates NEAR AI Cloud to Bring Verifiable Privacy to Home Robotics

Today, we are thrilled to announce a partnership that significantly moves the robotics industry forward: robotics OS developer OpenMind is leveraging NEAR AI Cloud‘s private inference technology to ensure their autonomous robots operate with advanced intelligence while maintaining an unprecedented, auditable standard of privacy.

The Imperative: Bringing Verifiable Privacy to the Home

The promise of autonomous home robotics is immense, but achieving consumer adoption is fundamentally tied to privacy. A robot in your home is not just a device; it is a sensor network observing your children, mapping your most private spaces, and potentially listening to confidential family moments.

The industry has historically presented a choice: limit the robot’s intelligence to basic on-device processing, or utilize powerful cloud AI and accept the risk of data leakage, security breaches, or misuse by the cloud provider. For complex, truly autonomous tasks, the latter has been the only viable path, forcing users to rely on fragile promises and policies. For OpenMind, a leader in autonomy, overcoming this constraint was essential to building the future of robotics.

NEAR AI Cloud: The Foundation for Verifiable Privacy Around Sensitive Workloads

OpenMind is utilizing NEAR AI Cloud’s private inference layer to address this imperative head-on. By moving AI workloads to a hardware-backed environment, this integration ensures user data is protected at every step. This approach is rooted in the belief that privacy should be an integrated, verifiable feature, not just a promise.

How NEAR AI Cloud Works

NEAR AI Cloud leverages  secure Intel TDX and NVIDIA Confidential Compute hardware create a protected processing layer for OpenMind OS inference:

1. Data Isolation: Data is encrypted on the robot before being sent to the cloud.
2. Secure Processing: Processing occurs only inside the secure Trusted Execution Environment, a shielded virtual machine. Inside this environment, the data is decrypted and inference is run. The result is encrypted and sent back to the robot where it is decrypted locally. No one, including NEAR AI, can access the raw data while it is being processed.
3. Verifiable Privacy: Users and developers receive a cryptographic proof that they can independently validate, confirming the computation ran securely on verified hardware.

This architecture allows OpenMind to utilize powerful models without the security risks associated with unverified cloud processing, setting a new industry standard for in-home trust.

Leading the Robotics Industry Forward

This collaboration provides dual benefits, accelerating both innovation and accessibility in robotics:

• Intelligence Without Compromise: OpenMind’s robots gain access to cutting-edge models that would be too heavy or costly to run on-device, ensuring their autonomy remains sophisticated.
• Hardware Efficiency: By offloading heavy processing to the cloud in a secure manner, OpenMind is able to reduce the need for expensive, high-power GPUs in the robot itself, making advanced home robotics more accessible to consumers.

Illia Polosukhin, CEO of NEAR AI:

“The applications for AI are limitless, but our responsibility to the user’s privacy must be absolute. By working with OpenMind, NEAR AI is demonstrating that critical use cases like home robotics can now be powered by the industry’s most advanced models, backed by verifiable security. This is what it means to build a foundation for user-owned AI.”

Jan Liphardt, CEO of OpenMind:

“Our goal is to build robots that genuinely enhance the quality of life in the home. Partnering with NEAR AI Cloud allows us to deliver on the promise of private, intelligent robotics by ensuring users have cryptographic confidence in our systems. This verified approach to trust is essential for the scaled adoption of autonomous technology.”

OpenMind is one of the many partners, including leading organizations like Brave Nightly, that are leveraging NEAR AI Cloud to make confidential computing simple, scalable, and production-ready.

We are excited to see how this collaboration will continue to shape the future of secure, autonomous AI and deliver value to users across the globe.

If you are a developer or enterprise interested in moving sensitive AI workloads to a verifiably private environment, visit https://near.ai/cloud to learn more about NEAR AI Cloud or reach out to our team of experts: https://near.ai/contact.

Disclaimer: NEAR Foundation CEO and NEAR AI Founder Illia Polosukhin is an investor in OpenMind in a personal capacity.