This Startup Aims to Give Everyone a Personal Cloud in the AI era: Privoce and Han Su

by admin · Published April 16, 2024 · Updated April 16, 2024

Han Su presenting Voce personal AI chat server.

Los Angeles, Ca (April 16, 2024) – In the 2000s, only geeks could build personal blog websites to share their writings and thoughts, and most netizens could only surf the internet without posting anything. In the 2010s, it became easy for netizens to get a Facebook or Twitter account and post content, or to register a Discord space and host a game party. However, none of the platforms we use today have the data and product features under our own control—poor data ownership and the consequent privacy issues have become the foremost challenges for the internet today.

Privoce was started in May 2020 by Han Su as an open-source project during his last month at MIT. After writing and defending his 80-page thesis “Theory and Practice Towards a Decentralized Internet” that exhausted his mind, he felt like building something applicable with his hands while waiting for his virtual graduation due to Covid-19. Inspired by the creator of the Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the Solid (social linked data) project, Privoce aims to re-decentralize the web through personal cloud computing. “If everyone becomes their own platform and interconnected to each other, and we make this process to be very smooth and user-friendly, then the world will be much more decentralized, or at least de-platformatized,” as said by Han Su during his pitches.

Han Su speaking about the media revolutions brought about by technological breakthroughs.

After entering well-known incubators and raising VC capitals during 2021-2022, the Privoce team has attracted contributors from all around the world, including but not limited to China, Brazil, Tanzania, France, and the US. Before founding Privoce, Han had interned at Hax Accelerator, a smart hardware incubator by SXSW based in Shenzhen, where he learned about various smart home devices and home servers like NAS. He also interned at the WeChat team, where he gained valuable insights on the key success factors of the super app like how to balance functionality and simplicity, and the limitations and fragility of a centralized super app. For example, there are billions of stickers taking up significant space in the Tencent cloud while not being used often. Han believed there could be a great synergy between home cloud and WeChat-like platforms. “What if we build a product that retains the features of WeChat while running and storing data on the user’s personal server?” The Privoce team decided to work on this idea and kept iterating the product based on users feedback. Privoce published the Voce chat server in early 2023, known as a 20 MB super-light, self-hosted social server. Keeping pace with the trends in open-source large language models (LLMs) and generative AI, Voce has also enabled users to add customized AI agents to the server.

Privoce now has attracted around 2000 stars on Github, and its chat server Voce has accumulated 100,000+ pulls from docker hub. Voce is now the most popular open-source chat on NAS devices, with hundreds of articles and videos discussing and providing feedback. As requested by a good number of users, Han’s team is now working on supporting the Matrix protocol. With a strong Rust engineering team, Han believes that Privoce can build a state-of-the-art chat server for the Matrix ecosystem that performs significantly better than its Python-written Synapse. Han envisions that in the AI era, everyone will need a personal cloud as a virtual home on the internet; if we compare Discord or Facebook to hotels where every user can reside but not control, the personal cloud will be your private property or single-family house, where AI agents are like furniture, your domain is like your address, and you can give different people different access rights to “visit” your social media posts, AI agents, digital wallet, etc.

Han Su was recently chosen as one of the “Top 30 under 30 Chinese in America” by LAPost from a pool of 942 candidates, recognized for his excellence and contributions in the technology field. Outside the digital world, Han has also served as mentors for different bootcamps, hackathons and workshops around the globe.