Although India is not at the forefront of the global battle for AI innovation, demand for AI in the country is growing as businesses seek efficiencies and technology companies promote AI developments as a panacea. The South Asian nation is expected to have an AI market approaching $17 billion by 2027 according to a joint report by IT industry body Nasscom and consultancy BCG.
neysa, an Indian startup led by experienced technology entrepreneur Sharad Sanghi, aims to take advantage of this growth opportunity by offering its artificial intelligence solutions to local and multinational companies in the country.
The Mumbai-based startup provides AI and machine learning infrastructure and platform as a service to enterprise clients based on their needs. It also includes dedicated infrastructure consulting and machine learning operations teams to help customers find the relevant size for their infrastructure and fine-tune or customize the models they choose.
Before founding Neysa with his former colleague Anindya Das in 2023, Sanghi spent more than 27 years at his previous company and data center provider, Netmagic, which Japan's NTT Knowledge acquired in 2016. He told TechCrunch that he intended to focus on cloud infrastructure and artificial intelligence in 2022 but failed to do so. He resigned as general director and CEO of Netmagic in June 2023 to start again at Neysa.
“I started at Neysa with the vision of providing infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, inference as a service, the service layer around ML, as well as the platforms we need for developers,” he said in an interview.
Neysa initially started as an infrastructure services provider and launched its flagship platform, Velocis, in July to provide on-demand access to IT infrastructure. However, it plans to expand the product line by launching its developer and inference platform as a service before the end of the year. The startup is also working on developing “observability for better management” of its infrastructure and securing AI workloads, Sanghi said.
With its entire suite of offerings in the works, Neysa is looking to compete with global hyperscalers, including typical cloud service providers like AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure, as well as new-age contenders like CoreWeave and Lambda Labs. Sanghi stated that the startup differentiates itself from existing players by offering “flexibility” in its models.
“We can offer both public cloud and private clusters. It's also the open source nature of our offering. “All of our platforms are built on open source platforms… so there is no dependency for customers,” he said.
The startup's consultation service also aims to attract local businesses, which often find it difficult to get the right infrastructure without spending thousands of dollars.
“Very often, customers come to us and tell us they want that many GPUs… and when we really look at the requirements, they don't need half the amount they had ordered,” Sanghi said.
Neysa has raised $30 million in an all-equity Series A round co-led by its existing investors NTTVC, Z47 (previously called Matrix Companions India) and Nexus Enterprise Companions. This follows the startup's $20 million seed round earlier this year.
The new financing, Sanghi said, will increase Neysa's infrastructure, improve its R&D and expand its marketing. The funds will also lay the foundation for the startup to launch its integrated Gen AI acceleration cloud service.
The startup currently has a staff of 55 people, which will increase by adding more engineers and staff to expand direct and indirect sales.
Neysa currently has around 12 paying customers and runs around six large proofs of concept. Up to 70 percent of its entire customer base has opted for the private cluster, while the remaining 30 percent are on a public cloud, Sanghi said.
While Sanghi did not reveal the names of Neysa's clients, he said the startup serves three general categories: research institutes, native AI startups and enterprise clients, initially in the banking, manufacturing and media sectors.
Neysa's current customer base is in India, although Sanghi said the startup plans to enter global markets with its next funding round, talks for which have already begun and are expected to close in the next six to nine months.
He did not reveal the exact amount Neysa is seeking to raise in its next round, although he stated that it would be “an order of magnitude more than what we have currently raised.” The startup also plans to take on debt to meet growing GPU and other infrastructure requirements.
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