Flower Labs, a Y Combinator-backed startup, on Tuesday launched a preview of its distributed cloud platform for serving AI models, called Flower Intelligence. Mozilla is already using it to power the upcoming Assist summarization add-on for its Thunderbird email client.

What makes Flower Intelligence unique, Flower Labs said in a post on X, is that it can drive on-device AI mobile, PC, and web apps that automatically hand off to a private cloud when needed (with a user’s permission) Apps default to an AI model running locally for speed and privacy but switch to Flower’s cloud when they require extra computational oomph.

Companies like Microsoft and Apple have adopted similar approaches across their operating systems and devices. However, Flower is one of the first to build a hybrid cloud-local AI platform entirely on open models, including models from Meta’s Llama family, Chinese AI lab DeepSeek, and Mistral.

Flower Labs claims that its cloud, the Flower Confidential Remote Compute service, employs end-to-end encryption and “other techniques” to protect sensitive user data. In a statement, Ryan Sipes, managing director for Mozilla Thunderbird, said that Flower Intelligence enables Mozilla to ship on-device AI that “works locally with the most sensitive data.”

Developers can apply for early access to Flower Intelligence as of Tuesday. Flower Labs says that it plans to make the service more widely available in the near future and introduce capabilities including model customization, fine-tuning, and “federated” training in the cloud.

Flower Labs is hosting an online and in-person summit in London on March 26, where the company is promising to reveal additional Flower Intelligence details and features.

Since launching in 2023, Flower Labs has raised around $23.6 million in venture capital from investors including Felicis, Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue, Betaworks, and Pioneer Fund. Brave, the open source web browser, was an early partner and collaborator.