Perla closes seed round for encrypted AI chat platform

Perla, a former Facebook engineer and early Lyft hire who has founded and sold several startups, is positioning his new platform around a privacy argument. He says that if users encrypt their AI chats, the cycle in which frontier labs absorb user data to train future models can be slowed. That pitch targets businesses that are seeing their AI spending balloon but also putting a premium on keeping their data private.

The platform's popularity data offers a snapshot of current demand. Perla said Chinese AI models, including those from DeepSeek, Zhipu, and Moonshot, are among the most popular on his platform, even as he wants to see a more vibrant American open-source ecosystem. There has been a flurry of Western open-weight releases in recent weeks, including from Reflection AI and Mistral; on Thursday, Meta released what it called "the most capable US open-weight model to date."

Looking further out, Perla said he eventually wants to launch the "New York Token Exchange." In that marketplace, thousands of models from thousands of hosting providers — any data center willing to run an open model — would compete to serve each request, turning AI tokens into a commodity that could be traded with futures, hedges, and price indices, like oil or electricity. He hopes to stage "model IPOs" for new open-weight releases.