For many enterprise firms, AI is both a promise that has but to ship or a safety danger. The hassle of Lithuania’s most well-known entrepreneur duo to unravel that conundrum has garnered consideration — and funding.
Simply months after Nexos.ai got here out of stealth with an $8 million funding spherical led by Index Ventures, Nord Safety co-founders Tomas Okmanas and Eimantas Sabaliauskas have closed a €30 million Sequence A (roughly $35 million) for this new startup — a a platform that helps firms undertake AI instruments securely by appearing as a intermediary between staff and AI programs.
In Okmanas’ view, “the largest company information leak” is at present within the making, as staff add delicate info to LLMs. Somewhat than banning AI use, he needs Nexos.ai to behave as a “Switzerland for LLMs,” serving as a impartial middleman. By sitting between groups and AI instruments, the platform goals to maintain information beneath management with out sacrificing the productiveness good points firms need however concern pursuing.
That mixture of seasoned founders tackling a crucial enterprise drawback explains why this new spherical was raised so quickly — with Index and Evantic Capital co-leading at a €300 million valuation (roughly $350 million), in keeping with an organization spokesperson. Earlier backers Creandum and Dig Ventures additionally participated, together with angel backers, together with the CEOs of Datadog, Klarna, Supercell, and Wix.
Evantic, the brand new enterprise agency launched by former Sequoia Capital accomplice Matt Miller, was persistent sufficient to make the spherical occur regardless that Nexos.ai wasn’t fundraising, mentioned Okmanas. He and Sabaliauskas famously bootstrapped their earlier companies, together with Nord, the $3 billion cybersecurity firm behind NordVPN. However they now see the value-add from VCs.
Along with Index’s assist, Nexos.ai is now benefiting from Miller’s steerage and his ‘Legends’ community —140 operators who advise Evantic’s portfolio startups in alternate for a share of the fund’s earnings. Okmanas mentioned he’s each a Legend himself and drawing on others’ experience to form the product — which is the place the brand new capital will go.
At the moment, Nexos’ AI product consists of an AI Workspace interface for workers and an AI Gateway for builders. The gateway acts as a management layer for safety, value administration, and compliance oversight whereas lowering fragmentation, which Okmanas sees as a key barrier to AI adoption. The gateway offers a single entry level to some 200 AI fashions, and the corporate plans to make use of its funding to speed up its assist of personal fashions for delicate information.
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Okmanas mentioned his workforce is at present doing 50 to 60 demo calls per week, however anticipates that conventional companies can have “quite a lot of homework” to do to persuade their boards about how they wish to undertake AI. Nexos.ai might assist them by making deployment simpler. However first, the startup is specializing in tech-savvy firms that already use AI day by day, in addition to firms working in regulated industries, which have considerations about governance and sending delicate information to AI fashions hosted in international international locations.
Okmanas and Sabaliauskas recognized the AI governance hole whereas overseeing the portfolio of Tesonet, their firm that builds and invests in startups. Tesonet portfolio firms are additionally among the many clients that Nexos.ai is disclosing, alongside Bulgarian fintech unicorn Payhawk, which additionally has an workplace in Vilnius. In keeping with a press launch, the funding will now assist growth throughout Europe and North America.
For Okmanas, the mission is eradicating limitations to broader AI adoption. Whereas boards debate whether or not AI can ship actual worth, he factors to outcomes inside Tesonet’s personal portfolio: at Hostinger, a hosting supplier, an AI assistant diminished the necessity for human assist. Says Okmanas, “That’s why we didn’t want to rent 500 folks and saved €10 million this yr alone.”
Regardless of speaking numbers at Hostinger, Okmanas declined to reveal how a lot income Nexos.ai itself is producing. As a substitute, he mentioned that by the point the corporate celebrates its first anniversary, the workforce can have grown to 100 folks — principally in Europe, the place information sovereignty considerations have additionally began to open doorways for Nexos.ai at public establishments, probably opening up a brand new market past its enterprise focus.
The headline of this story has been corrected for accuracy.
