NestAI Achieves €100M Raise, Nokia Assists in Secure AI Targeting

0:00Welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Jaden Schaefer. Today on the show, we're going to be talking about one of the most interesting and maybe even perhaps one of the most telling moves happening right now in global AI. and that is that Finland's Nest AI just raised 100 million euros and they raised it and signed a strategic partnership with Nokia to build AI systems specifically for defense and national security. Now, in Europe, I think right now this is a really hot topic. It's definitely been out of vogue, I think, for many years in the past working with technology and defense, but I think right now we see that there definitely are foreign adversaries that are willing to invade countries countries and you need to have the technology to fight against that.

0:43So I'm happy that this is kind of coming back to the forefront where this is no longer voodoo or taboo. I guess you could say, you know, Google in the past had a whole bunch of employees that pressured them to not work with any sort of defense departments in the United States. And, you know, at the end of the day, if you live inside of the United States or for, you know, something like Nokia or one of these other companies living inside of Finland. If you live inside of a country, you would want to contribute to the national security because the country is directly benefiting your company. Okay, off of my soapbox with that one, let's talk about what the company is doing.

1:20I think it's a really big signal that Europe is stepping directly into the arena with some really serious innovation. They have serious funding and they have serious intent. We're seeing more and more of these deals come out of the EU where they're heavily investing in AI. And I think it's going to have a lot of positive impacts. Before we get into that, I wanted to say you probably pay for multiple subscriptions to get access to all of the best AI tools, ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini, 11 Labs for audio. There is a lot of cool tools for images, and the costs can definitely add up very quickly.

1:54I had the same problem. So I built AIbox.ai. So for just$20 a month, you get over 40 different of the top AI models in one simple platform. You get text, image, audio, everything you need. It's all in one place. So no more juggling tabs, no more wasting money on overlapping subscriptions. If you want to give it a try, there's a link in the descriptions to AIbox.ai. Okay, let's get into Nest AI because this company just essentially came out of nowhere and suddenly its position itself is one of the most important defense companies in or, you know, defense startups in Europe, defense aligned, I guess you could say.

2:30So what does it do? And why does Finland care so much about it? It's a Finnish company, and it's building sovereign, secure foundation models, which means that they're creating models that the European government and the militaries can run privately. So they're not depending on America or China and tech giants from those two countries. And Finland is very motivated right now. This is a country that shares a very long border with Russia. They joined NATO recently, and they have been accelerating their defense modernization. much faster than a lot of people anticipated. So for Finland right now, creating this kind of secure AI is not a nice to have.

3:03It's definitely critical for their national survival. They're seeing what happened in the Ukraine. And what's interesting, they want a model that can operate offline. It's encrypted end to end. It has in remote bases, in battlefield environments, and without trickling any data back to Silicon Valley or any other countries. I think honestly, this is something I've talked about before on the podcast. The countries that secure their own sovereign AI models are going to have a really big advantage over countries that are outsourcing everything, right? You can't outsource all of your data, all of your AI, all of your technology to other countries.

3:38Well, the United States is very friendly with Europe right now. And I hope it's like that forever. Like you really just can't ever trust everyone else in the world. So Mest AI essentially said that they're going to build the backbone for European defense AI. and apparently investors agree because this is 100 million euros that is going into this company and then they're also making a partnership with nokia and i think this is where it gets really interesting nest ai signed this strategic partnership with nokia which yes this is the same one that built all of those brick phones that we used growing up and i think this is important for a couple different reasons nokia controls a lot of secure communications infrastructure obviously we're all using iPhones and Android phones today.

4:21Some of which I guess Nokia could be having, you know, impact on although when Microsoft bought them and tried to do the Microsoft deal, kind of killed Nokia from the handheld device, but they still control a lot of communications networks and a lot of infrastructure. And defense systems depend on these networks. Nokia already powers all of those. So merging now with AI is a really easy fit. They also have really deep relationships with the European governments. They're trusted, they're established, they're definitely a not controversial company. And so if they're saying, you know, we've created this AI, and it's safe, I think NATO is more inclined to listen to them.

4:57They're a European country, company. And so that makes a lot more sense. And I think right now, because AI is moving to the edge, Nokia is one of the best companies at building edge hardware. Europe also wants independence from the US and China. And so this is, you know, basically checks all the boxes that they have there. The real reason why this matters is because AI and defense is becoming an arms race right now. Every major power is funneling billions of dollars into AI military applications. The US has Palantir, Scale AI, OpenAI partnerships with the DoD. They have Andrel, they have Shield AI.

5:31China has its military tech ecosystem fully integrated with its AI giants. Israel is field testing fully autonomous targeting and vision systems. The UAE is pouring billions into sovereign models like Falcon. And Europe is, you know, I hate to say it, but historically it's been sort of slow and bureaucratic. So it's a bit overregulated and they have more of a focus on AI safety than on AI capabilities. So Finland is not waiting around. This$100 million investment is essentially signaling to Europe that they are moving forward and the best AI is going to win the next geopolitical era. Nest AI right now is positioning itself as the trusted European alternative to US and Chinese models.

6:11So what kind of defense AI are they actually building? Nest AI is working on AI enabled surveillance and reconnaissance tools, secure vision models for identifying threats in real time, AI decision support systems for military operations, encrypted large language models for intelligence analysis, on-device AI that can run inside of military networks, autonomous detection systems for drones and sensors. I think one thing that really stood out to me is that they are building models that work offline in low power environments and without massive data centers. This is really big because right now most big AI models assume you have gigabit internet, huge GPU clusters, cloud systems.

6:46But if you're running a sensor tower at a remote border post or you know, a drone in the Arctic, you don't have any of that. So Nest AI is designing an AI that works in the field. And you know, not just at some big data center in the desert somewhere. I think it's a big wake up call for Europe. And I think that this signals investors are definitely interested in this space. They put$100 million in it definitely wasn't a normal round. But they're betting really big that defense AI is about to explode. Nations are investing billions. NATO is building joint AI frameworks, the US just approved autonomous drone deployments.

7:23I think the battlefield is definitely becoming digital and investors know this. So they're putting in a lot of money right now to try to help fuel that. So where does this go next? I think a few things are coming. Number one, Europe is going to start announcing more sovereign AI defense models. I think NATO is going to create a joint AI standard body. Defense companies are going to partner with AI labs directly. We're already seeing, you know, the DoD partnering directly with OpenAI, for example. Autonomous surveillance systems, I think, are going to grow faster than anyone is currently predicting.

7:53And every country is going to begin building its own private secure LLMs because at the end of the day AI now is as essential as fighter jets satellites and missile defense systems so whoever builds the best models is definitely going to shape the future and the battlefield I think Finland of all places might be the country that kicks off Europe's great AI move in this direction and it'll be interesting to see if any other players join in thank you so much for tuning in to the podcast today this is your spot for the latest in AI and business news If you enjoyed the episode, it would mean the world to me if you left a rating review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

8:27Don't forget to check out our latest tools over on AIbox.ai. You can just describe any tool that you want to create, and AIbox.ai will build it for you with our AI app builder. So it's a one-click builder. The link's in the description to AIbox.ai.