A curated map of 29 companies building AI outside the cloud — from edge silicon and on-device LLMs to cross-platform SDKs and embodied applications. Device-edge scope, not CDN edge.
Where does AI run when it is not in a central cloud data centre? This landscape map is a curated snapshot of 29 companies across five buckets — from silicon and on-device LLMs to cross-platform SDKs and embodied applications.
Scope: device-edge and on-device AI (not CDN edge). Updated: April 2026.
Read this first: Edge ≠ On-device
Edge is the broader term: anywhere AI runs outside a centralised cloud — factory-floor servers, on-prem appliances, base stations, and physical devices. Edge computing is a deployment location, not a device class.
On-device is a stricter subset: AI that runs on the end device itself — the phone in your hand, the camera on the wall, the sensor on the machine, the chip in the robot. No network round-trip, no external inference server.
What the map covers
The PDF groups players into five layers:
1. Edge hardware — silicon, accelerators, and servers (Hailo, NVIDIA Jetson, Qualcomm, Ambarella, and others). 2. On-device LLMs — model providers, open-source families from frontier labs, and optimisation runtimes (Liquid AI, Llama, Gemma, Cactus, Nexa AI, and others). 3. On-device infrastructure — platform-vendor toolkits (Core ML, ML Kit, MediaPipe) versus cross-platform application SDKs (Captur, NimbleEdge). 4. Edge AI applications — robotics, autonomy, embodied AI (Figure AI, Boston Dynamics, Wayve, Nuro). 5. Adjacent infrastructure — neighbouring slices often conflated with the core buckets (Edge Impulse, Roboflow, Latent AI, Wallaroo.AI).
The author's note in the map explains methodology (public sources, CES 2026, funding), caveats (open-source runtimes as ecosystem infrastructure rather than player tiles), and disclosure.
Download the map
The full landscape — player tiles, definitions, and methodology — is in a single PDF you can save or share with your team.
Download the PDF — The Edge & On-Device AI Landscape (April 2026)
