Building the Foundations of Sovereign AI
Ava Technologies' commercial work is grounded in a broader research effort focused on one core question:
How can intelligence be deployed without being captured by platforms?
Answering that question requires more than product development. It requires new assumptions about locality, control, coordination, and incentives.
Our research and open-source work explores these foundations — openly, carefully, and over the long term.
Why Research Matters
Most AI systems today are shaped by the incentives of centralised platforms. This leads to predictable outcomes: intelligence concentrates where infrastructure is cheapest, data becomes the default payment mechanism, and users surrender control by necessity.
Ava Technologies' research starts from a different premise:
Intelligence should operate within boundaries defined by the user or organisation — not the platform providing it.
This belief underpins both our commercial deployments and our open research.
The Nano Collective
Open Research into Decentralised AI Infrastructure
The Nano Collective is an open research and open-source initiative exploring the long-term infrastructure required to support sovereign, decentralised AI systems.
Its focus is not on products, but on coordination mechanisms for distributed AI infrastructure, incentive models that reward real contribution, open tooling for private local-first intelligence, and governance structures that resist capture over time.
The Collective exists to explore problems that cannot be solved within a single company or product.
Some of this research and tooling is developed openly through the Nano Collective.
Relationship to Ava Technologies
Ava Technologies is a commercial builder. The Nano Collective is an open research effort. The two are intentionally distinct.
Ava Technologies
Builds and deploys production AI systems
Works directly with organisations under real constraints
Applies research outcomes where they are mature and practical
The Nano Collective
Explores long-term infrastructure questions
Maintains open-source tooling and research
Operates independently of commercial timelines
This separation ensures that research integrity is preserved while commercial work remains grounded and accountable.
Open Source as a Discipline
Open source, in this context, is not a growth tactic or marketing strategy. It is a discipline.
Where problems relate to shared infrastructure, coordination, or trust, openness is often the only way to make progress without centralising power.
Our open-source contributions focus on tooling that enables local and private AI execution, infrastructure components that can be independently audited, and research artefacts that inform future deployment models.
Not all work is open. But work that affects shared foundations should be.
Long-Term Direction
Ava Technologies believes the future of AI infrastructure will be more local, more decentralised, and more user-controlled.
Research conducted through the Nano Collective explores how distributed compute, open coordination, and cryptographic guarantees may extend sovereignty beyond single devices or organisations.
This work is exploratory by design. It informs direction — not promises.
Who This Work Is For
Our research and open-source efforts are relevant to:
Engineers building privacy-first AI systems
Researchers exploring decentralised infrastructure
Organisations thinking beyond cloud-only models
Contributors aligned with long-term autonomy
Engagement is intentional and measured. The goal is depth, not scale.
Relationship to Sovereign AI
Sovereign AI is not achieved through technology alone. It is a coordination problem.
Research and open-source work provide the space to explore solutions that are not yet commercially viable but are structurally necessary.
Commercial deployment applies what is ready. Research ensures the future is not constrained by the present.