In the global AI wave, the technology powerhouse India is poised to seize significant market opportunities. According to a report jointly released by the IT industry association Nasscom and consulting firm BCG, the Indian AI market is expected to reach $1.7 billion by 2027. Against this backdrop, Neysa, a startup led by seasoned tech entrepreneur Sharad Sanghi, has emerged, aiming to capitalize on this growth opportunity by providing AI solutions to both local and multinational enterprises.
This Mumbai-based startup specializes in offering customized AI and machine learning infrastructure and platform services to corporate clients. Notably, Neysa also has a professional machine learning operations and infrastructure consulting team to help clients determine the appropriate infrastructure scale and fine-tune and customize the selected models.
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Neysa's founder has a remarkable background. Before co-founding Neysa with former colleague Anindya Das in 2023, Sanghi had spent 27 years at data center provider Netmagic, which was acquired by Japan's NTT Data in 2016. As a serial entrepreneur, he originally planned to focus on cloud infrastructure and AI in 2022 but was unable to do so. Eventually, he resigned as Managing Director and CEO of Netmagic in June 2023 to fully commit to Neysa's venture.
In terms of product layout, Neysa initially positioned itself as an infrastructure service provider and launched its flagship platform Velocis in July this year, offering on-demand computing infrastructure access. The company plans to roll out a developer platform and inference-as-a-service by the end of the year, further expanding its product line. Sanghi revealed that the company is also developing an infrastructure "observability management" system and enhancing the security of AI workloads.
In the competitive landscape, Neysa's rivals include not only traditional cloud service providers like AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure but also emerging players like CoreWeave and Lambda Labs. Sanghi emphasized that Neysa's differentiation lies in the "flexibility" of its models, which can provide both public cloud and private cluster services, and all platforms are built on open-source, avoiding customer lock-in issues.
In terms of customer composition, Neysa currently has about 12 paying customers and is conducting six large-scale proof of concepts. Interestingly, 70% of customers opt for private clusters, while 30% use the public cloud. The clients are primarily from three sectors: research institutions, AI-native startups, and corporate clients from the banking, manufacturing, and media industries.
In terms of financing, Neysa has just completed a $30 million Series A funding round led by NTTVC, Z47 (formerly Matrix Partners India), and Nexus Venture Partners. This funding will be used to enhance infrastructure, strengthen R&D, expand the market, and lay the groundwork for launching integrated generative AI acceleration cloud services. Notably, the company has already begun planning its next round of financing, which is expected to be completed within the next 6 to 9 months and will be "an order of magnitude higher" than the current round.