Although India just isn’t on the forefront of the worldwide battle for AI innovation, demand for AI is growing within the country as firms strive for efficiency and technology firms promote AI developments as a panacea. The South Asian country is predicted to have an AI market By 2027 it needs to be 17 billion US dollarsin accordance with a joint report by the IT industry association Nasscom and the consulting firm BCG.
Neysaan Indian startup led by veteran tech entrepreneur Sharad Sanghi, goals to capitalize on this growth opportunity by offering its AI solutions to local and multinational firms within the country.
The Mumbai-based startup provides AI and machine learning infrastructure and platform as a service to enterprise customers based on their needs. This also includes dedicated machine learning and infrastructure consulting teams that help customers find the relevant size for his or her infrastructure and refine or adapt the models they select.
Before founding Neysa along with his former colleague Anindya Das in 2023, Sanghi spent over 27 years at his former enterprise and data center provider Netmagic, which was acquired by the Japanese company NTT Data in 2016. He told TechCrunch that he intended to deal with cloud infrastructure and AI in 2022, but was unable to achieve this. In June 2023, he resigned as Managing Director and CEO of Netmagic to start out anew at Neysa.
“I began at Neysa with the goal of providing Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, Inference as a Service, the service layer around ML, in addition to the platforms we want for developers,” he said in an interview.
Initially starting out as an infrastructure service provider, Neysa launched its flagship platform Velocis in July to supply on-demand access to computing infrastructure. However, it plans to expand its product range by launching its developer platform and inference-as-a-service before the tip of the 12 months. The startup can be working on developing “observability for higher management” of its infrastructure and securing AI workloads, Sanghi said.
As it prepares its full suite of offerings, Neysa goals to compete with global hyperscalers, including typical cloud service providers equivalent to AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure, in addition to new-age rivals equivalent to CoreWeave and Lambda Labs. Sanghi claimed that the startup stands out from existing players by offering “flexibility” in its models.
“We can offer each public clouds and personal clusters. It can be on account of the open source nature of our offering. All of our platforms are based on open source platforms… so there isn’t a lock-in for patrons,” he explained.
The startup's consulting service also goals to draw local businesses that usually find it difficult to get the suitable infrastructure without spending 1000’s of dollars.
“Very often customers come to us and say they need so many GPUs… and after we really take a look at the necessity, they don't need half the quantity they asked for,” Sanghi said.
Neysa has raised $30 million in an all-equity Series A round co-led by its existing investors NTTVC, Z47 (formerly Matrix Partners India) and Nexus Venture Partners. This follows the startup's $20 million seed round earlier this 12 months.
The recent funding, Sanghi said, will expand Neysa's infrastructure, improve its research and development and expand its market launch. The funds may even provide the inspiration for the startup to launch its integrated Gen AI acceleration cloud service.
The startup currently employs 55 people and can expand this by hiring more engineers and employees to expand direct and indirect sales.
Neysa currently has about 12 paying customers and is running about six large proof-of-concepts. According to Sanghi, as much as 70 percent of the overall customer base has opted for the private cluster, while the remaining 30 percent use a public cloud.
While Sanghi didn’t disclose the names of Neysa's customers, he said the startup broadly serves three categories: research institutes, AI-native startups and enterprise customers, initially in banking, manufacturing and media.
Neysa's current customer base is in India, although Sanghi said the startup plans to enter global markets with its next round of funding – discussions have already begun on this and completion is predicted in the following six to nine months.
He didn’t reveal the precise amount Neysa plans to boost in the following round, but stated that it might be “an order of magnitude greater than what now we have currently raised.” The startup also plans to boost debt to satisfy growing GPU and other infrastructure needs.
