RunAnywhere Launches from Y Combinator as On-Device AI Platform for Running Models Locally on iOS & Android

We're excited to officially introduce RunAnywhere (YC W26). Our mission is simple: make on-device AI the default way apps ship intelligence at scale. We officially launched in January 2026 as part of Y Combinator's W26 batch. You can view our official YC launch announcement here, and read more about our vision in our LinkedIn announcement.

AI belongs on the device. Users expect instant responses, functionality that works on planes or subways, and privacy for sensitive data like health, finance, and personal conversations. But in reality, shipping on-device AI today is still painful. Every device behaves differently. Models are large and difficult to update safely. Teams end up stitching together download logic, resume handling, memory management, inference runtimes, and cross-platform bindings—all before they can even focus on product.

We built RunAnywhere to remove those sharp edges.

One SDK. Full-Stack On-Device Infrastructure.

RunAnywhere provides a single SDK that lets apps run multimodal AI (chat, voice, and more) directly on phones and edge devices. Instead of rebuilding the same infrastructure from scratch, teams integrate our SDK in a few lines and get:

Model delivery with resumable downloads and versioning
Safe extraction and storage management
Lifecycle handling so models load/unload safely across app states
Abstraction over multiple inference engines
Cross-platform support for iOS (Swift), Android (Kotlin), React Native, and Flutter

We handle the "boring but critical" infrastructure so your team can focus on the user experience.

Offline-First. Hybrid-Smart.

We don't believe the future is local-only or cloud-only. It's hybrid.

RunAnywhere includes a control plane that lets you define routing policies: run requests locally for speed and privacy by default, and automatically fall back to the cloud when devices are constrained, whether due to thermal limits, memory pressure, or confidence thresholds.

Through our dashboard, teams can:

Roll out model updates over the air
Manage policies across device fleets
Monitor performance, fallback rates, and stability in production

This means on-device AI can finally be managed like real infrastructure, not a fragile experiment embedded in your app.

Built by Engineers Who've Shipped at Scale

Before RunAnywhere, we built mobile SDKs used by millions of users and reliability systems supporting large fleets of devices. We've experienced firsthand how difficult it is to operationalize AI beyond a demo. We also shared more about our founding story and vision in our YC announcement on LinkedIn.

RunAnywhere is our attempt to make that operational layer standardized, scalable, and developer-friendly.

We're already live, open source, and growing, with thousands of developers exploring our SDKs and demo apps.

Who We're Working With

We're actively partnering with teams building:

Voice AI experiences
Offline agents
Privacy-sensitive features in healthcare and enterprise
Hybrid chat systems
Apps looking to reduce cloud inference costs while keeping performance high

If you're building AI for mobile or edge environments and want it to be fast, reliable, and fleet-managed, we'd love to talk.

What This Means for Developers

On-device AI shouldn't be a pile of custom glue code. It should be infrastructure.

With RunAnywhere, you can:

Ship faster: Integrate multimodal AI in minutes, not months
Reduce costs: Cut cloud inference costs by up to 90% by running models locally
Improve privacy: Keep sensitive data on-device by default
Scale confidently: Manage model updates and policies across thousands of devices
Monitor in real-time: Track performance, latency, and device health with built-in analytics

Get Started Today

RunAnywhere is live and ready for production use. Our SDKs are open source, and we're actively working with teams to ship on-device AI at scale.

Try the SDK: Get started with our documentation
View the source: Explore our GitHub repositories
Read the YC launch: Check out our official Y Combinator launch post
Connect with us: Follow our journey on LinkedIn

We're building the infrastructure layer that makes on-device AI production-ready, so you can run AI anywhere.

RunAnywhere officially launched from Y Combinator in January 2026 as part of the W26 batch. We're backed by Y Combinator and building the future of on-device AI infrastructure.