MacPaw is expanding its AI strategy through a new partnership with Liquid AI, aiming to bring locally hosted intelligence into its products and eventually into the hands of developers building for SetApp.
The Ukraine-based software company is developing a local version of its AI assistant Eney, first introduced last year. To support that effort, Liquid AI is creating an on-device inference system called Elix along with a local memory layer designed to help AI tools run directly on a device.
According to Liquid AI co-founder and CEO Ramin Hasani, the approach is built around selecting model architectures that match the hardware from the start. That design can improve efficiency while supporting privacy, security, and faster local execution.
MacPaw CEO Oleksandr Kosovan said locally hosted models could also enable assistants and agent-style workflows to function offline, widening their practical use in everyday software.
MacPaw plans to position SetApp more strongly around AI applications, with the subscription platform already serving more than 150,000 paying users. The company is also exploring a credit-based system for AI tasks, where usage would depend on the complexity of the operation.
Once the local processing framework is finalized, MacPaw wants to open the technology to developers, pairing on-device inference with access to cloud models from providers such as Google. The result could be a flexible environment for building smarter apps across local and cloud-based AI. This shift may help define a more efficient and adaptable future for app development.
