FAQ

The system is real and running today: the AI, the security architecture, chat, and persistent memory operate together on hardware in our lab, and we publish dated proof as we go. The images on this page are industrial-design renders of the production enclosure, labeled as such; production photography ships with the campaign. Some pieces are still in build, and we say which, plainly, rather than pretending otherwise.

Vora is a small founding team. Jesse Posner worked on the security systems guarding Coinbase's Bitcoin custody, contributed open-source Bitcoin development with Brink, and served as a senior blockchain architect at Block. Erik Cason worked at Coinbase from 2013 to 2017 as a support operations director, later at Unchained, and wrote Cryptosovereignty, the philosophy this company is built on. We build AI the way you build custody: assume attack, prove protection, publish the work.

We launch on Kickstarter this fall and publish the shipping window with the campaign. After the campaign you get 30 days to confirm your order. If a date moves, you hear it from us first, with the reason.

We launch in the United States, Canada, and the European Union. More regions follow as we certify the hardware for them. Join the waitlist and we'll tell you the moment yours opens.

Because the risky parts are already behind us. The computer inside Aegis is proven, shipping silicon from AMD, not a custom board we have to invent, and our software runs on that exact hardware today. The enclosure is in production engineering with a physical model being built now. And until you confirm your order, your deposit stays fully refundable, so our risk never becomes yours.

No. The machine you buy runs the full experience on its own, forever. There are two optional plans, and you can skip both. Aegis Pro adds frontier-model credits for heavier cloud research and coding: $20, $100, or $200 a month depending on how much you use. Guardian Care ($20 a month) keeps a complete encrypted backup of your Guardian, under keys only you hold. Your Aegis does everything local without either, which is almost everything.

When you want frontier-scale firepower on tap. Everyday work runs on your own hardware, free forever. Aegis Pro adds credits for the biggest cloud models, useful for long research jobs and heavy coding, in three sizes ($20, $100, $200 a month) matched to how much you send. You choose what goes out, task by task, and nothing is sent without your say.

Three things. Your place in the founding batch. The founders price of $1,999 instead of $2,999 retail, locked. And the amount itself credited in full toward your machine: it is the first payment on your Aegis, not a fee on top.

Yes, in full, any time before you confirm your order: one email to support@vora.io. When you confirm your order after the campaign, the deposit is applied to your purchase, and our return policy takes over from there.

Then you lose nothing. Your deposit is refundable regardless of how the campaign goes, and we only take the full purchase price when you confirm your order. A reservation with us is never a bet on a campaign; it's a place in line that you can leave at any time.

Prices step up by batch, and we publish every step: founders $1,999, then $2,250 early on Kickstarter, then $2,699 late in the campaign, then $2,999 retail. The earliest supporters carry the most risk and get the deepest discount. Your reserved price never moves.

No. Your data trains nothing. It lives encrypted on your device under keys only you hold, so we cannot see it, and we could not train on it if we wanted to. There is no data broker in this business model and no cloud mirror of your life. We can't use what we never hold.

Nothing that is yours. We cannot read your messages, files, memories, or what you ask your Aegis. The only things that ever touch our servers are encrypted data we cannot decrypt and a few narrow pieces of operating metadata, like device IDs and connection state, that carry no content at all. What Aegis observes about how you use it stays on the device.

No. The 2-year hardware warranty comes with the machine and stays in force whether or not you ever subscribe to anything. We've seen other hardware companies void warranties when a membership lapses; we think that's ownership theater. Your Aegis is yours, and so is its warranty.

If you're in the EU, the law gives you an unconditional right to return the device for a full refund within 14 days of delivery, no reason required, and no policy of ours can waive that right. Everywhere we sell, our warranty and return terms sit on top of your statutory consumer rights, never in place of them.

A personal AI appliance for your home. Plug it in, connect the accounts you choose, and it becomes an assistant that knows your world: your mail, your calendar, your files, your people. It runs powerful open AI models on hardware you own, so the intelligence lives with you.

Ask anything about your own life and get answers with real context. Draft in your voice. Search every email, message, and meeting you've ever had. Summarize your files. Let it handle errands and hand you the summary, not another to-do list. It is the assistant you'd build if the assistant worked only for you.

Aegis ships running Gemma 4 26B, one of the strongest open models available, entirely on the device. And the model is yours to choose: as better open models are released, you upgrade freely. Your hardware doesn't expire when the model world moves; it gets smarter.

Aegis is a compact desktop appliance, sized for a shelf or a desk and designed to be seen: an aluminum body over a solid wood base. It runs quiet. Exact dimensions, weight, and noise measurements publish when production units are measured.

No. There is no keyboard and no monitor: you set up Aegis from your phone, sign in once, and it starts learning how you work. If you can plug in a lamp, you can own an Aegis.

The intelligence runs at home, so asking, drafting, and searching your own life work without a round-trip to anyone's cloud. Aegis uses your connection to sync the accounts you link, fetch updates, and run the errands you send it out for.

Yes, for everything that lives on the device: asking questions, drafting in your voice, searching your own life. Syncing new mail, running errands out on the internet, and fresh updates on your phone wait until the connection returns; until then, the app keeps showing your latest brief and recent conversations.

No. Aegis is built to hand you a finished result, not another to-do list, but only low-risk, easily reversible steps happen on their own. Anything with real consequence, sending an email, creating a calendar event, making a purchase, waits for your confirmation by default, and you set that boundary yourself. Purchases carry a hard per-transaction cap that even the loosest setting cannot override. Paid errands arrive shortly after launch rather than day one.

Every AI can be wrong; anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. Aegis has two structural advantages: it works from your actual records rather than a model's memory of the internet, and anything consequential it drafts waits for your approval before it goes anywhere. You stay the editor of your own life.

It won't replace your judgment, and we built it that way on purpose. The heaviest frontier-scale work uses optional cloud credits rather than running locally. At launch it connects the biggest accounts first, with more integrations arriving on a published schedule. Guardian Care backs up your Guardian's world, not full photo and video libraries, at launch. And it serves one owner per device today. We'd rather you know the edges before you pay us.

Email, messages, photos, calendar, financial accounts, health data, social media, and music, starting with the accounts most people live in. Everything lands in one encrypted place on your device, organized and searchable.

Through a short wizard in the app, and with a difference that matters: your sign-in keys live on your own device, and your data flows directly from the provider to your Aegis, never through a Vora server in between. Reconnecting or revoking access later is a single button in Settings.

Yes. Connect a personal Gmail alongside a work account, label each one, and Aegis keeps their contexts straight.

The disconnect takes effect immediately: Aegis stops pulling new data from that account and stops using it in new answers. What it already stored stays under your control, and everything you've brought in can be exported or deleted from Settings, any time.

Yes. Import your conversations from ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, along with your photos, documents, email, and contacts. Aegis picks up where your other tools left off, so day one already feels like home.

Aegis serves a single owner per device today: your Guardian knows one person deeply, and that focus is part of the privacy design. A household where several people each want their own private world would need a device per person. Family and household modes are territory we care about; we'll talk about them when we can do it right.

The phone app is how you first pair your Aegis, since the device has no screen or keyboard, and it stays useful for quick questions and notifications wherever you are. Deeper work, like connecting accounts and managing settings, is most comfortable from a laptop in the web app. Full parity between phone and desktop grows in the months after launch.

Keep them if you like; Aegis can even send them the errands you choose. The difference is where your life lives. Cloud assistants answer to the company that runs them, and your context lives on their servers, under their policies. Aegis answers to you: your context stays in your house, and nothing about your life is anyone else's asset.

For everyday work, drafting, summarizing, and searching your own life, today's open models are genuinely strong, and Aegis ships with one of the best. For the hardest frontier problems, the biggest cloud models still lead; that's exactly what optional Aegis Pro credits are for, sent only with your approval. You get the honest split, and it keeps improving in your favor: open models advance every few months, and your Aegis upgrades freely.

It's closer to the opposite. Alexa and Siri are the front ends of someone else's cloud: a speaker in your room, the intelligence and your data on their servers, the loyalty with the company. Aegis inverts every part of that: the intelligence and your data live in your home, you talk to it through the app when you choose rather than a live microphone in the room, and it answers to you alone.

It's true, and we won't pretend otherwise: you can buy a bare mini-PC with similar silicon for less and build your own stack. Aegis is the finished instrument: the appliance, the assistant, the security architecture that keeps it loyal, the updates, and the support, in an enclosure built to live in your home. You're buying the years of not assembling, hardening, and maintaining it yourself.

Cloud help is optional and scoped. When you send a task out, only the content you approve for that task leaves; your database never does. Prefer nothing to leave? Turn cloud features off and Aegis stays fully useful, locally.

Every Aegis carries a 2-year hardware warranty against defects, from the day it's delivered: we repair, replace, or refund at no charge. With Guardian Care, a hardware swap never means losing your digital life: your replacement restores from your encrypted backup and wakes up as you.

Automatically and verifiably. Updates are cryptographically signed and checked against the published source before anything installs. Auto-update is on by default, you can pause it, and if an update ever fails, Aegis rolls itself back to the last working version on its own. Your machine gets better without you babysitting it.

Guardian Care ($20 a month, optional) keeps a complete, continuously updated backup of your Guardian: your database, your mail and messages, your documents, your assistant's memory, your settings. Everything is encrypted before it leaves your device, and the keys stay with you; we could not read your backup if we tried. It is not a storage locker with a meter. It is one promise: if your Aegis is lost, stolen, or dead, your new one comes back as you. Prefer to run your own backups? Everything exports, and the machine never requires the service.

Then not even we can help, and that's the design working. Your recovery phrase is the only key to your encrypted backup, and we never hold a copy: there is no support path that gets it back, because a support path that could would be a back door. Write it down when you get it and store it in more than one safe place. Real custody comes with real responsibility, and we'll say so plainly rather than pretend otherwise.

Your Aegis keeps working. It runs without our servers, needs no subscription, and no activation server can turn it off. Your data exports in open formats you can take anywhere. We built the machine to outlive us, on purpose.

Yes. Export everything, in open formats, whenever you want. No lock-in, no exit fee, no fine print. Ownership that can't leave isn't ownership.

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