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Getting Started With Nemo: Desktop Setup, Mobile Pairing & Your First Bank

Most finance apps drop you into a sign-up form and demand your bank credentials before they have earned any trust. Nemo flips that. The desktop app installs in under a minute, your data lives on your machine, and you only connect a bank when you are ready. This guide walks through the three things you actually need to do on day one: install the desktop app, pair your phone, and connect your first account through Teller.

If you have five minutes, you can finish all three.

1. Installing Nemo on Your Desktop

Nemo is a desktop application, not a website. There is no browser tab, no SaaS dashboard, and no cloud sync of your transactions. Everything runs locally on Windows or macOS, which is the entire reason your financial data stays yours.

Download the Installer

Head to nemoagent.ai/download and grab the installer for your platform. The Windows build is a signed .exe using an EV code signing certificate, so SmartScreen will not flag it. The macOS build is a notarized .dmg for Apple Silicon. Both files are hosted on Cloudflare R2 and the download takes a few seconds.

Run the installer. On Windows you will see the standard NSIS wizard, on macOS you drag the app into Applications. There is nothing to configure during installation itself.

Create Your Nemo Account

Launch Nemo for the first time and you will land on the sign-in screen. Click Sign Up, enter your email and a password, and submit. Nemo sends an 8-digit verification code to your inbox — check your spam folder if it does not show up within a minute. Paste the code into the verification screen and you are in.

The account itself is just for two things: signing in across devices, and pairing your phone later. None of your bank data ever travels through it. Even your password is hashed with bcrypt server-side and the access token is a short-lived JWT — nothing on the server can decrypt your local vault.

Add Your AI Provider Key

Nemo’s smart features — auto-categorization, the natural-language chat, monthly insights — all run through a large language model. We do not provide that model. Instead, you bring your own OpenAI or Anthropic key. There are two reasons for this:

• Privacy. Your transactions go directly from your machine to your provider’s API, never through our servers. We never see them.
• Cost. You pay metered API costs (typically a few cents a month for personal use) instead of a flat $10–15 monthly subscription that funds the app maker’s margin.

Open Settings → AI Provider, paste your OpenAI or Anthropic API key, and click save. Nemo will use it for every LLM call going forward. If you do not have a key yet, both providers let you create one in about two minutes from their dashboards.

Nemo never charges you for AI features. It cannot, because Nemo never sees your prompts. The LLM call goes from your machine straight to the provider you chose.

2. Connecting Your First Bank Through Teller

Nemo uses Teller for bank connections. Teller is a developer-first banking API, which means two important things: connections are read-only by design, and the credentials live on your machine, not on Nemo’s servers or Teller’s. This is fundamentally different from cloud finance apps that store an OAuth token on a shared server you have to trust.

Get a Free Teller Application

Go to teller.io and create a free developer account. From the Teller dashboard:

1. Create a new application. Give it any name (this is just for your records).
2. Generate an mTLS certificate and private key. Teller will hand you a ZIP containing both.
3. Copy your Application ID from the dashboard.

This whole step takes about three minutes. Teller’s free tier covers 100 enrollments and is fine for personal use indefinitely.

Save Your Credentials in Nemo

Back in Nemo, open Settings → Connections and find the Teller card. Click through to the Teller setup wizard:

1. Pick the ZIP file Teller gave you. Nemo extracts the certificate and private key and stores them in your local DPAPI-encrypted vault. They never leave your machine.
2. Paste your Application ID and click Save. Nemo verifies the cert is valid and reports back.

Once that succeeds, Nemo also generates a vault key — a long opaque string starting with nemo-vk- — and pushes an encrypted blob of your credentials to your Nemo cloud vault. This is what makes mobile pairing work later. The cloud only ever sees ciphertext; the key to decrypt it lives on your devices.

Link Your First Bank

In the same Connections screen, click Connect Bank. Nemo opens Teller Connect — a small popup that lets you search for your bank, log in with your real credentials, and pick which accounts to share. Teller hands an enrollment token back to Nemo, which stores it in the local vault. The whole process takes maybe 30 seconds.

As soon as the popup closes, Nemo pulls your accounts and recent transactions and the dashboard fills in. Balances are live, transactions go back as far as your bank allows (usually 90 days for the free tier), and your AI provider starts auto-categorizing in the background.

If you need to add a second or third bank, you can repeat the Connect Bank step as many times as you want. Each one creates a new enrollment under the same Teller application, and they all show up in the same accounts view.

3. Pairing Your Phone

Nemo has a companion mobile app for Android (with iOS in beta). The phone is not a separate account or a separate database — it’s a thin client that pairs with your desktop’s vault and pulls the same encrypted credentials. Once paired, your phone can fetch live balances, see transactions, and run the same AI chat — all using the cert you set up on the desktop.

Install the Mobile App and Sign In

Install Nemo from the Play Store (or the TestFlight build for iOS) and sign in with the same email and password you used on the desktop. You will land on the home screen, but the accounts view will tell you the device is not paired yet. That’s expected: you have a Nemo identity but no bank credentials.

Copy Your Vault Key from the Desktop

Switch back to your desktop and open Settings → Device Pairing. You will see a field labeled This device’s key with a masked value beginning with nemo-vk-. Click the eye icon to reveal it, then click the copy button.

This key is the second factor that protects your vault. Your Nemo email and password alone cannot decrypt your bank credentials — anyone trying to pair a new device would also need this key. Treat it like a recovery code: do not paste it into chat, do not share it, and do not store it anywhere a stranger could read.

Paste It Into Mobile and Restore

On your phone, open the Pair with Desktop screen. Paste the nemo-vk-... key into the input field and tap Restore from cloud. The phone downloads the encrypted vault from the cloud, decrypts it locally with the key you just pasted, and unlocks your bank credentials.

Within a few seconds the screen flips to a green checkmark and the message “Your bank credentials are synced from the desktop. This device can fetch live balances and transactions.” That’s it. Your phone is now a fully functional Nemo client.

Pairing is one-way: the phone reads what the desktop has set up. You cannot accidentally overwrite your desktop’s data from the phone. If you ever lose the phone, you can unpair it from the desktop and the credentials are wiped from the device immediately.

What to Do Next

With the desktop installed, Teller connected, and your phone paired, the boring infrastructure work is done. The interesting part — actually understanding your money — starts now. A few things worth doing in your first session:

• Open the chat and ask things like “how much did I spend on coffee last month” or “what subscriptions am I paying for”. The LLM has full access to your local transaction history.
• Set up a budget in the Budget tab. Nemo uses zero-based budgeting by default but does not force any methodology on you.
• Review the auto-categorization. The first run categorizes everything Teller has, and you can correct anything Nemo got wrong — those corrections become rules for next time.
• Check the Net Worth chart on the Accounts page. It builds historical snapshots from the moment you connect, so the longer you use Nemo the more useful that chart becomes.

Everything else in Nemo — schedules, briefings, the simulator, the marketplace — is built on top of these three foundations. Get them right and the rest of the app just works.