AI firm Simplismart raises $7 million in Series A funding led by Accel

Simplismart has outperformed public benchmarks by building the world’s fastest inference engine.

Artificial intelligence (AI) firm Simplismart has raised $7 million in Series A funding led by venture capital Accel. Shastra VC, Titan Capital and angels including Notion co-founder Akshay Kothari also participated in the round, the firm said on October 18.

Co-founded in 2022 by Amritanshu Jain and Devansh Ghatak, Simplismart has outperformed public benchmarks by building the world’s fastest inference engine. This engine allows organisations to run machine learning (ML) models at high speed, boost performance, and drive down costs.

Inferencing in AI refers to the process of using a trained model to make predictions or draw conclusions based on new, unseen data. It involves applying learned patterns from training data to infer outcomes, classifications, or insights in real-time applications.

The funding will be used for its infrastructure that enables organisations to deploy AI models seamlessly.

“With the steep costs and complexities involved, nearly 90 percent of machine-learning projects are estimated never to make it to production,” Simplismart said. Its fast inference engine allows users to leverage optimised performance for all their model deployments.

“This tranche, more than ten times the size of the previous round, will fuel R&D and growth for their enterprise-focused MLOps (ML Operations) orchestration platform,” the company said.

The startup said it is positioning itself as the critical enabler for AI’s transition into mainstream enterprise operations, the way cloud computing was adopted.

It said most companies struggle to deploy large AI models in production, at a time when Generative AI (Gen AI) is estimated to generate over $10 billion in revenue by next year.

The firm, which had under $1 million as initial funding, has engineered on-premise enterprise deployments, which is also agnostic towards choice of model and cloud platform. This is in contrast to most competitors, who focus on hardware optimisations or cloud computing.

Anand Daniel, Partner at Accel, said not only did Simplismart identify opportunities in this segment early, they already have begun serving some of India’s fastest-growing AI-powered companies in production. “Amritanshu and Devansh have everything it takes to win in the massive but fiercely competitive global AI infrastructure market,” he said.