Locai rebrands as Aventail™ to give businesses control over their AI inference
The company relaunches in October with a platform that gives businesses control over AI inference
London, 5 October 2026. Locai, the inference orchestration company, is now Aventail.
With Aventail™, every AI request runs where the business says it should: on an employee's laptop, on servers or a private cloud it already operates, in a UK or European data centre, or with a frontier model API. In April, Aventail™ raised a £1m pre-seed round led by Fuel Ventures. The Deep-Tech start-up was part of the Google for Startups Accelerator initial cohort
For an enterprise with strict rules on where its data can go, each AI use case has meant a separate infrastructure project and a separate security review. Aventail™ replaces that with one place to set the rules and one place to see them applied. Requests stay on the organisation's own network unless a rule sends them out. Aventail™ holds the configuration, not the customer's data, and every routing change is logged, so a compliance team can see where work has been allowed to go and when that changed. The same rules can push routine work onto hardware the organisation already owns and keep paid capacity for the jobs that need it.
“Every enterprise conversation we have ends at the same question: where does this request go, and who can see it on the way?” said Joe Ward, co-founder and CEO of Aventail. “We built the platform so a business answers that once, in rules, and it holds for every request after that.”
About Aventail™
Aventail™, formerly Locai, is an inference orchestration and routing platform founded in Cardiff in 2025 by Joe Ward and Saif Al-Ibadi. It runs and routes AI inference anywhere it needs to happen, from the chip in a user's laptop to the largest frontier models, and manages all of it from one control plane. The company is backed by Fuel Ventures.
Notes to editors
An Aventail™ is the curtain of chainmail that hung from a medieval helmet and moved with the wearer to cover the neck.
Existing customers keep their contracts and deployments. locai.co.uk will redirect to aventail.co.uk.
The legal entity remains Locai Ltd during the transition to the new name.
Media enquiries: media@aventail.co.uk