Serial entrepreneur Sharad Sanghi’s latest venture Neysa, which provides artificial intelligence (AI) cloud and platform-as-a-service, has completed $30 million in fresh capital, six months after the startup raised its seed round, a top executive told VCCIrlce.
The latest Series A round was co-led by its three existing investors Japanese telecom giant NTT’s venture capital arm NTTVC, VC firms Z47 (formerly Matrix Partners India) and Nexus Venture Partners.
“The main purpose of the capital is to build our compute, storage and AI-native network infrastructure,” said Sanghi, co-founder and chief executive of Neysa. “We will also use the funding for go-to-market and research and development for building our platform.”
Sanghi set up the startup in January 2023, along with former Netmagic executive Anindya Das, who is the chief technology officer of Neysa.
Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur BV Jagadeesh, who previously set up data centre company Exodus communications, will be the startup’s chairman.
Neysa offers platforms and services to its customers to discover, plan, deploy and manage their generative AI projects cost effectively and secure their AI landscapes in a consumption-based model. It deploys these through public native infrastructure that allows companies to use pre-trained models or private clusters for training data.
“Since our last round, we’ve gone live with our flagship platform (Neysa Velocis). We have enhanced our infrastructure for both public cloud and private infrastructure. We plan to launch both platform and inference as-a-service offering very soon.”
Its platform Neysa Velocis allows its customers across small and big enterprises to access high-performance computing infrastructure on-demand that can be managed through a simpler UI.
“What makes Neysa unique (among AI startups) is Sharad’s track record in infrastructure in the past. It can probably scale faster, and also can help customers by working very closely,” Vab Goel, Founding Partner at NTTVC and Board Member of NTT DATA, told VCCircle.
Sanghi previously started one of India’s largest datacentre solutions companies Netmagic and sold it to NTT.
Neysa is seeing demand from across sectors, including AI-first digital natives, media and entertainment companies, service providers, software vendors, and the public sectors, and already secured orders from paying customers.
“Neysa is already seeing some of the world’s largest brands targeting Indian customers who want to deploy the AI infrastructure with the startup,” said Goel.
NTTVCC, Nexus and Z47 had backed the startup in its seed round in April 2024, when it raised $20 million, in what was arguably one of the largest seed rounds in India then. Since then, multiple early-stage startups have secured large seed rounds.
In April, fashion startup Lyskraft, founded by Zomato’s co-founder Mohit Gupta and Myntra and Cultfit’s co-founder Mukesh Bansal, raised $26 million in April. Earlier this month, Centricity, a wealth-tech startup, secured $20 million. Last week, elder care startup Primus Senior Living bagged $20 million in a seed funding round.
Neysa’s latest fundraise comes amidst a series of Gen AI-focussed startups raising large rounds worldwide, as investors look to the next big company in the constantly evolving space.
In India, recently, Bansal’s AI startup Nurix raised $27.5 million in a mix of seed and Series A round. Previously, in March, another generative AI startup Ema secured $25 million in Series A round. AI startup Sarvam announced it had raised $41 million in Series A round in December. In January, Krutrim, AI startup founded by Ola’s Bhavish Aggarwal, gained unicorn status, after it pocketed $50 million in funding from investors including Z47.
