Entrepreneur Sharad Sanghi, who started one of India’s largest datacentre solutions companies Netmagic and sold it to Japanese telecom giant NTT, has formed a new venture Neysa that offers AI cloud and platform-as-a-service to enterprises.
The startup has secured $20 million in seed capital, arguably the largest seed round since former Nazara Technologies CEO Manish Aggarwal’s web3 gaming venture Kratos Studios raised nearly $20 million in February last year.
The round is led by Matrix Partners India, Nexus Venture Partners, and NTT’s venture capital arm NTTVC. Nexus had also invested in Netmagic in 2008.
The company plans to use the capital to further build Neysa's infrastructure and improve its research and development initiatives, the company said in a statement.
"Our goal is to leverage this funding to push the limits of innovation, assisting our clients with our end-to-end Generative AI Platform-as-a-service ecosystem and our AI Observability Platform,” said Sanghi, chief executive of Neysa.
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 B V Jagadeesh, who previously set up data centre company Exodus communications, will be the startup’s chairman.
Neysa offers a suite of 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.
“Enterprises globally, and even more so in India, are eager for expertise in helping them transition to AI native cloud computing and there is no better and more experienced team in India for them to partner with,” said Avnish Bajaj, managing director, Matrix Partners India.
Neysa’s fundraise comes amidst a series of Gen AI-focused startups raising large rounds worldwide, as investors look to the next big company in the constantly evolving space. In India, 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 Matrix Partners India.
