nenna.ai Develops AI Privacy Platform on Exoscale’s European Cloud Infrastructure

nenna.ai was founded in Berlin in 2023 by a team of four with specialized expertise in natural language processing and machine learning. The AI privacy startup is tackling a challenge that is putting increasing pressure on companies: How can the power of large language models be harnessed without revealing sensitive data? The answer is an AI privacy platform that masks personal and confidential information in real time before it reaches a model, and then translates the model’s response back into fully readable text. The model sees only anonymized data points, while users receive their results in plain text. The entire platform runs on Exoscale’s European cloud infrastructure, with server locations in Germany and no data transfer to third countries.

nenna.ai’s offering consists of four products:

• NENNA Chat offers companies a secure, internal AI interface where employees can use any models—exclusively from European providers, if desired.
• NENNA Watch uses a browser extension to monitor the use of external AI tools and prevent sensitive data from leaking unchecked. This helps prevent “shadow AI” usage.
• With NENNA Shield, companies can integrate data protection features into their own applications via an API.
• For the legal sector, nenna.ai has developed NENNA Legal, a specialized solution that complies with the requirements of attorney-client privilege.

The company has already won the Legal Tech Award from the German Legal Tech Hub as Germany’s best legal tech startup of 2025 and the ATHENE Award from the Fraunhofer Institute as one of the three leading cybersecurity startups in the DACH region.

The Challenge

Shadow AI is no longer a marginal phenomenon in companies. Employees upload documents to public AI chats, ask questions about client projects, or have contracts summarized—and in the process, confidential information ends up on servers that the company neither knows about nor controls. Dr. Max Flöttmann, CTO and co-founder of nenna.ai, identifies the fundamental dilemma: “Tons of corporate data end up in free public accounts because it helps employees do their jobs. And if you don’t simultaneously regulate AI usage while also enabling efficient work with AI, you’ll lose your data.”

Companies that outright ban employees from using AI actually drive uncontrolled use even further. nenna.ai’s solution, therefore, is not restriction but controlled access. Companies receive a platform that makes AI productively accessible without relinquishing control over their data. To reliably deliver on this promise to corporate customers, nenna.ai needs an infrastructure that meets the same requirements.

In Search of the Right Infrastructure

When the team began building the platform in early 2024, Hetzner provided parts of the infrastructure. The offering was sufficient for the initial development stages but quickly reached its limits. nenna.ai had to build and operate the entire cluster infrastructure on its own; databases ran on its own servers, and scalable managed services were lacking. For a small team that wanted to devote its entire engineering capacity to product development, this was not a sustainable foundation in the long run.

An American hyperscaler was ruled out as an alternative from the start. Anyone who promises their customers that their data will be protected on European infrastructure cannot entrust that data to U.S. companies. From previous professional experiences, the team was also familiar with the phenomenon that Flöttmann calls the “golden cage.” A provider starts with a practical service, then another comes along, followed by yet another, and eventually the system becomes so deeply entrenched in a single provider’s ecosystem that switching has effectively become impossible. Open standards and portability were therefore non-negotiable for nenna.ai from the very beginning.

After comparing several providers, Exoscale—the European cloud infrastructure provider from A1 Digital—emerged as the clear choice for several reasons. Unlike with many competitors, the development team was able to test services and processes immediately, without first having to go through multiple sales meetings. When regular support didn’t help, engineers were directly available to resolve issues promptly. Because Exoscale is built on open standards, nenna.ai isn’t tied to a single provider. The company can bring in another provider or switch at any time without having to build up specialized expertise for a proprietary platform. Flöttmann summarizes the decision: “From my perspective, Exoscale functions like a hyperscaler, at least for us as a company. And I can use it just as easily as I was used to using AWS before. The fact that Exoscale provides a European infrastructure is not a minor consideration for a company like nenna.ai—it’s the decisive difference.”

The nenna Platform in Action on Exoscale

Today, nenna.ai uses several Exoscale services to operate its platform. At its core is a managed container infrastructure on which the entire application logic runs. This is complemented by cloud-based object storage for data management and managed databases.

Real-time masking places special demands on latency and computing capacity. As a user types, the system must immediately detect whether personal or confidential data is at risk of leaving the company. To achieve this, nenna.ai relies on specialized, smaller AI models that respond significantly faster than their larger counterparts.

Thanks to Exoscale, nenna.ai was also able to expand the functionality of NENNA Chat. The solution now features a cloud instance on Exoscale that allows the model to work directly with uploaded files—that is, to create documents, analyze Excel spreadsheets, or populate company templates—while the masking layer remains active at all times.

Results

Since launching on Exoscale in early 2025, nenna.ai has expanded its infrastructure at least twentyfold. What began with just a few instances is now a complete, scalable cloud infrastructure that has grown alongside the platform’s requirements. Customers such as Duisport, Europe’s largest inland port, the Mazak Media Group, and IWB use the platform—in some cases, already company-wide.

nenna.ai’s engineering capacity, which would previously have been devoted to manual infrastructure operations, is now fully dedicated to product development. For a small team, this is more important than the equally significant cost savings. Flöttmann attributes the fact that this benefit was noticeable from the very beginning to the nature of the collaboration: “The support team has been very helpful from day one. It has always been a very pleasant collaboration on equal terms.”

Outlook

nenna.ai is working on extending data masking to external data sources and is simultaneously pursuing additional certifications. Following its existing ISO 27001 certification, the company will begin the ISO 42001 certification process in the fall of 2026—the AI-specific standard for model transparency. On the infrastructure side, nenna.ai and Exoscale are continuing to develop their collaboration to keep pace with the platform’s growth and expanding feature set.