What Nera does
Nera Systems was founded in November 2023 in Palo Alto, California, to answer a question regulated firms kept asking: how do we use frontier AI on the data we are not allowed to expose? The answer is Nera ChatApp, a chat interface that lets a team ask plain-language questions of spreadsheets, client financials and operational records. The data is encrypted on the customer's side before anything leaves their environment. The model receives the question and the structure of the data, writes the analysis, and the result is decrypted only with the customer's key. Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini and OpenAI GPT models all work this way inside Nera, and customers can bring their own model keys.
That architecture is why accounting and advisory firms, fractional CFOs, banks and credit unions, insurance underwriters and consumer-goods teams can put AI to work on client numbers without a new disclosure to explain. Nera signs a Data Privacy Addendum as a processor under GDPR and a Business Associate Agreement with HIPAA covered entities, runs on Google Cloud as an official partner, and publishes its security posture, subprocessor list and architecture on the Trust Center. What customers do with it is on the Customers page, and the blog covers the questions security and compliance teams ask most.
Founder
Rami Akeela, Ph.D. is the founder and CEO. He holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Santa Clara University and a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Lehigh University, and has spent about twenty years building hardware, security and cryptographic infrastructure. Before Nera he founded DZK, the first company to build an FPGA-accelerated, end-to-end zero-knowledge proof system, and co-founded Fabric Cryptography. He writes the In Confidence newsletter on confidential AI for regulated industries and is on LinkedIn and ORCID.
Programs and partners
Nera is a Google Cloud Partner and a member of the Techstars Web3 Accelerator class of 2025. The company has also been supported by Google for Startups, Microsoft for Startups, AWS Startups, HubSpot for Startups, NVIDIA Inception, the Anthropic startup program, Stripe and ElevenLabs Grants.