About TONi
TONi is the brand, vision and technology behind a personal computing platform that keeps its intelligence local. Grid is its workspace, served on the web at toni.ng. Keep is its offline-first agent runtime, which runs on the machine in front of you.
Our Story
On September 20, 2025, I sat with a question I couldn't shake: was I finally ready to build something that could grow from a startup into a real organization? After research and gut instinct pointed the same direction, the idea crystallized around two words — intelligence and privacy. Privacy tooling exists, but almost always for enterprises; for individual developers, it's still brutally hard to set up. And in this new era of AI, I didn't believe people should have to hand companies their prompts just to benefit from an intelligent lifecycle.
That became the founding idea: a unified workspace where privacy isn't a setting you switch on, it's the default. From that grew the first concrete piece — an offline-first assistant (what I first called a chatbot, later an agent, once I understood the distinction) — alongside a freelance system, a news feed, and a growing list of tools meant to live in one place instead of scattered across a dozen accounts.
The early architecture was rough, and the idea needed to be treated properly and executed well before it could become anything real. Somewhere in that stretch, the idea started needing a name. I searched for one, and found that while "TONI" and "toni" were already taken, TONi — capital T‑O‑N, lowercase i — was not. It fit: everything about TONi is built around unification, inside out, and privacy. I started building, and Claude became a real part of accelerating that build.
By August 20, 2026, Insights and several other services were already built and working, and I'd bought toni.ng. But I recognized I still hadn't properly executed the idea that started it all. I came to this without money, a co-founder, or a formal engineering background — I learned to code through luck and hard circumstances, and patched together what I could, with AI helping close the gap. TONi still stands today because that core idea has to be finished, not shelved: intelligence is our future, but our privacy is not something big companies get to take from us to build it.
The first deploy to toni.ng lands September 1, 2026. Public and private launch dates are still ahead.
Our Guiding Principles
Mission
Build a single, privacy-first workspace — Grid, Insights and Keep — proving one working feature at a time that intelligence and privacy were never supposed to be a trade-off, and widen what it can do as the hardware and the models improve.
Vision
A future where personal computing is unified and intelligent on its own terms — one workspace, not a dozen accounts, where the machine in front of you can reason, plan and act without first sending your life to someone else's server.
Motto
Keep Intelligence Yours.
A place to use intelligent tools without surrendering privacy, and to stay informed without wading through noise.