Ukraine-based app developer MacPaw has entered into a strategic partnership with Liquid AI to integrate locally hosted artificial intelligence models into its products, with the long-term goal of making this advanced tech stack available to other developers. The company is simultaneously preparing its SetApp app store to host AI applications, introducing credit-based usage plans for its users.
MacPaw is currently advancing its AI assistant, Eney, which was initially unveiled last year. The company now intends to develop a locally hosted version of Eney, enlisting Liquid AI to create a specialized on-device inference system, named Elix, alongside a robust local memory system for this purpose.
“Before training our models, we select an architecture that is different and tailored to the hardware. That allows us to really have the most efficient version of intelligence that runs directly on the device, with benefits like privacy and security,” Liquid AI’s co-founder and CEO Ramin Hasani informed TechCrunch.
Oleksandr Kosovan, CEO of MacPaw, highlighted that locally hosted AI models will also empower users to operate assistants and complex agentic workflows even when offline.
It is worth noting that Apple already supplies its own local models to developers. However, Hasani asserted that Liquid AI’s models are specifically engineered to deliver superior performance across a diverse array of capabilities.
Hasani further elaborated, “We are also building a customization stack around models. This means that with user input, the models can use the data and improve. We want our models to be adaptable and become more intelligent over time.”
MacPaw plans to intensify its focus on AI applications for its subscription-based app store, SetApp, which currently serves over 150,000 paying users.
Once the local processing architecture with Liquid AI is fully established, MacPaw intends to make this technology accessible to developers, enabling them to integrate on-device inference capabilities into their own applications. Kosovan also indicated that the platform will provide access to other cloud-based models from providers such as Google, thereby functioning as a comprehensive, one-stop solution for developers.
MacPaw is already experimenting with a credit-based pricing structure for the app store, where users can execute a predetermined number of AI operations, with usage dependent on their available credits and the complexity of the specific task.
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