Sharad Sanghi’s AI startup Neysa raises $30 mn in Series A from NTTVC, Z47, Nexus Venture Partners

Sharad Sanghi, co-founder and CEO, Neysa.

AI acceleration cloud system provider Neysa on October 22 announced that it has raised $30 million in a Series A funding round, co-led by existing investors NTTVC, Z47 (formerly Matrix Partners India) and Nexus Venture Partners, coming less than a year after its $20-million seed round.

Neysa is the second venture of Sharad Sanghi, the former chairman of data centre major NTT India's global data centres and cloud infrastructure business. He co-founded Neysa with Anindya Das, who is the CTO, and BV Jagadeesh, the chairman. He also founded Netmagic Solutions, a data centre solutions provider, which was later acquired by NTT.

Sanghi, co-founder and CEO, told Moneycontrol that the latest funding round came in response to the initial success and traction of its Neysa Velocis orchestration platform and deployment of its own cloud infrastructure that went live in July.

An orchestration layer is the ability to schedule and allocate GPU resources for AI usage. So Velocis as a self-service platform will enable customers looking to deploy AI workloads, with the choice to schedule and allocate GPUs, opt for virtualised GPU or fractional GPU or in a “containerised environment”, without having to pay for the full GPU space.

The platform has paying customers across research institutes, AI startups, and enterprise clients, especially in the banking and insurance sector. Neysa’s customer base includes AI-first digital natives, media and entertainment companies, service providers, software vendors, and the public sector.

The fresh capital raised will be utilised to “more than double down on the infrastructure" that Neysa has deployed. “We're also using some of the funds for R&D for enhancing our platforms that we've started and for go-to-market. We have to build our sales team, both direct and indirect sales too. So that is the reason for this fund raise,” Sanghi said.

He expects the startup to break-even and turn profitable by next year.

“The team’s innovation and commitment to accelerating Gen AI solutions are creating a significant impact in the region’s tech ecosystem. We have seen first hand how Sharad built India’s largest datacenter company from inception. His experience and track record are a critical differentiator in building and scaling the next-generation Gen AI cloud provider,” Vab Goel, founding partner at NTTVC and board member of NTT DATA, Inc, said.

"Sharad, Andy and Neysa team’s remarkable progress in a short period of time has been inspiring. Neysa finds itself in the enviable position of having more demand than any other company I have seen at a similar stage and is a catalyst for digital transformation not just an AI provider,” Avnish Bajaj, founder and managing director of Z47, said.

Plans ahead

After launching Velocis and its cloud services, Neysa plans to launch a developer platform later this year, where developers can do the entire machine learning operations online.

In its third phase Neysa, will be offering inferences as a service. Additionally, the Mumbai-based startup is building an observability platform.

“We already have the first phase of our observability ready so that customers can see the usage, can track the uptime, the usage of the infrastructure that they deploy. We have some deep insights, especially on the network because the networking for AI workloads is very complex. So we have that already running,” Sanghi said. “We're also working on security of AI infrastructure and AI workloads. That is the Aegis platform that will come out later next year.”

The growth has been very significant in terms of GPU, infrastructure sales and platform sales. For sourcing GPUs, Neysa has partnered with Supermicro, HP and Dell, Sanghi said.

Neysa has recently hired several tech industry veterans to strengthen its leadership team. Currently a team of 55 people, the startup looks to add more people with ML Ops and infrastructure scaling background. By the end of FY25, the startup will have close to 100 employees.