One Year of Private AI: How Maple AI Made Encryption Easy
One year and billions of tokens later, we proved it can be done. We figured out how to give people similar power to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini while letting them keep their data completely private. No seed phrases. No complex key management. Just log in like any other app and start chatting.
Using private AI is now convenient.
We launched Maple in January 2025 because we believed privacy shouldn't require sacrifice. Today, with 5x user growth in the last six months alone, over 90% of paying customers staying with us month after month, and major feature releases throughout the year, that belief has become reality.
Privacy doesn't require sacrifice.
The Problem We Solved
Here's the dilemma: AI needs info about you to be useful, but handing over your data to another company leaves you vulnerable. Your questions about life, your legal strategy, your business plans, your private thoughts. All of it feeds into systems that serve others. Worse, that data can be subpoenaed and used in court proceedings against you.
The first time this got real for me was 20 years ago when a website I used got hacked. I checked an online tool to see if I was affected, and right there in plain sight was the password to my account. Back then I was more naive and had used that password on many websites, so the race was on to change passwords everywhere. That was just a password. Now with AI, we are entrusting far more intimate details of our lives to other organizations.
Many people sense this. A Menlo Ventures survey from June 2025 found that 39% of US adults don't use AI at all. Of those, 71% cite data privacy concerns as the reason. We built Maple for them, and for everyone who wants AI without unnecessary surveillance.
The tools that could protect you, like end-to-end encryption, have historically been nightmares to use. Write down a 24-word recovery phrase. Don't lose it. If you do, your data is gone forever. Most people gave up and accepted the privacy trade-off.
Maple was built to make privacy easy. Our CEO is a former Apple software engineer who worked in AI/ML privacy. Our CTO comes from the encryption and defense-tech space. Together, we built an AI assistant where strong encryption happens automatically, invisible to the user. And our privacy is a technical guarantee, not just a policy promise.
The Privacy of Local, The Power of the Cloud
When you use Maple, your data is encrypted on your device before it ever touches the network. Your personal encryption key is managed automatically. Behind the scenes, secure enclaves handle everything that would traditionally require you to be a cryptography expert. Download, sign up, and your first encrypted chat is ready in under a minute.
We run open source AI models like Kimi K2, OpenAI GPT-OSS, DeepSeek R1, and Whisper that match the capabilities of proprietary systems. Your data never touches OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, or Google. You get frontier-level AI running on powerful cloud hardware, but your data stays yours.
What Our Users Tell Us
A lawyer told us his bar association prohibits using client information in ChatGPT. He was spending hours summarizing documents and substituting fake names. Now he uploads actual client documents directly into Maple.
A therapist had her ChatGPT account suspended because of information contained in her session transcripts. Now she uses Maple to pull insights from sessions and suggest action items, saving hours each week.
A financial advisor was spending hours redacting documents before uploading them to ChatGPT, then adding sensitive client data back in afterward. Now he works directly with client files. The subscription paid for itself almost immediately.
A musician was frustrated that his creative work was being captured by large AI systems and used to train models that could replace him. In Maple, his lyrics and song concepts remain his.
Something we hear constantly: "When I started using Maple, I finally realized how much I was holding back from AI. I can be myself and tell it everything." AI needs personal context to be effective. In Maple, you get better results because you can give it the full picture without fear.
These professionals can finally work naturally with AI because of what's happening under the hood.
What Makes This Work: Trusted Execution Environments
The technology behind this is called confidential computing, built on Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). Think of it like the secure hardware that powers Apple Pay on your phone, but running in the cloud.
A TEE is a hardware-isolated environment where even the cloud operator cannot see the data being processed. Your prompts enter the enclave encrypted. The AI processes them inside the protected boundary. The response comes back encrypted. At no point does your plaintext data exist outside that hardware-enforced wall.
Our code is open source. Our builds are reproducible. Anyone can verify that the code running on our servers matches what we publish on GitHub. The Maple app checks this automatically. If the server code doesn't match, it refuses to connect.
Don't trust, verify.
Why This Matters
A good friend recently told me:
"You are a unique brain with memories and ways of thinking. When you feed a central AI with your thoughts, they capture it and you can't get it back. At that point, what's left of you?"
Proprietary AI systems build detailed profiles of who you are on someone else's servers. Those profiles can be edited, weighted, or nudged in directions that serve the system's goals rather than yours. When your mental model lives in a black box you can't inspect, you've outsourced something precious.
We believe in verifiable AI. The right to inspect means open source code. The right to verify means cryptographic attestation. The right to own means your data stays yours.
One Year In, Just Getting Started
Maple has grown from an encrypted chat into a full private AI ecosystem. In our first year, we shipped voice, document upload, live web search, cutting-edge reasoning models, and apps for major platforms. Individual plans for people and working professionals, Team plans for organizations, and the Maple Proxy API for anyone who wants to make their AI tools more secure. Any productivity app that talks to ChatGPT on the backend can instantly make all its traffic private by switching to Maple's API.
We're just getting started.
In 2026, we plan to make Maple even more personal. Daily help from a tool that gets to know you, keeps watch over important items in the background, and saves you time across multiple aspects of your life. The core mission stays the same: easy and powerful AI that makes privacy the default, not the exception.
Your data stays yours. Your thoughts stay private.
You are free to think.
