A brand new AI orchestration startup from the founders of Lithuanian unicorn Nord Safety is getting down to assist enterprises put their AI tasks into manufacturing, with an preliminary concentrate on bringing larger visibility, safety and adaptableness to giant language fashions (LLMs).
Nexos.ai, because the startup is named, is the handiwork of Tomas Okmanas (pictured above) and Eimantas Sabaliauskas, who constructed one of the crucial recognizable manufacturers not solely in Lithuania, however in all of Europe. Nord Safety, greatest identified for its flagship VPN product NordVPN, bootstrapped its manner by its first 10 years earlier than succumbing to a bumper $100 million funding in 2022 at a $1.6 billion valuation (it later hit a $3 billion valuation throughout a subsequent fundraise).
Their new firm is exiting stealth as we speak with $8 million in funding from a slew of high-profile backers, together with lead investor Index Ventures, which has now made its first ever funding into Lithuania.
“We’ve known of Tomas and the work that he’s done for many years, so as soon as we heard that he was building a new company in the AI space, and was finally willing to take venture capital money at this [early] stage, we were very eager,” Index Ventures’ companion Hannah Seal advised TechCrunch.
Different notable buyers embrace Creandum and Dig Ventures, and outstanding angels such because the CEOs of Datadog, Klarna, Supercell, and Wix additionally participated.
Capitalizing on a catalyst
At the moment, groups that need to put their AI into manufacturing have to attach myriad instruments, which doubtless includes recruiting and constructing groups with the mandatory expertise. That is the place Nexos.ai desires to step in.
“I’ve seen that there’s a big gap between running AI as pilots and going into production,” Okmanas advised TechCrunch in an interview. “When you’re testing AI in your lab, it might work and it can be useful, but when you want to put it into production, especially in enterprises, how do you ensure high availability? How do you ensure security? How do you manage cost?”
Nord Safety’s been round for greater than a decade, however 5 years in the past, it was folded into an umbrella firm referred to as Tesonet, an incubator with a portfolio of greater than two-dozen companies. Considered one of these is web-hosting agency Hostinger, which not too long ago added AI-enabled smarts to its web site constructing software. Okmanas, a Hostinger board member and shareholder, stated a number of the points they encountered served as a catalyst for what would ultimately turn into Nexos.ai.
“We wanted to employ AI in our website builder, so we turned on OpenAI, we started testing it, and we put it in production,” Okmanas stated. “In August, we had $150,000 billed. For what? Why was it so expensive? There was no visibility.”
And when OpenAI went down a handful of occasions, Okmanas was satisfied that one thing needed to be executed to make it simpler to deploy, handle and optimize the “increasingly complex ecosystem of AI models” that organizations might have.
By means of a easy API (software programming interface), clients can entry greater than 200 AI fashions, from big-name incumbents like OpenAI and Anthropic to smaller, area of interest LLMs. The thought is, if OpenAI goes down, an organization can quickly (and robotically) change to a distinct supplier with out breaking stride. Or if the prices concerned in accessing a particular LLM explode for no matter purpose, an organization can transition to a different one to maintain their prices down.
Nexos.ai additionally ushers “intelligent caching” into the combination — if a specific query is repeated by a number of customers, the system can flip to its personal database slightly than persevering with to interact the LLM, which may get costly.
On the safety and compliance fronts, Nexos.ai additionally prevents people from sending non-public knowledge to LLM suppliers, or if an worker leaves an organization, their entry will be terminated instantly.
There’s no escaping the elephant within the room, although: One of many causes enterprises have been hesitant to embrace AI is the thorny difficulty of knowledge safety — healthcare firms, banks, or insurance coverage companies can’t merely belief LLM suppliers with all their delicate info. It’s value noting that Hostinger itself was hit with an information breach in 2019 and NordVPN has additionally been hacked previously — the type of assaults that every one firms face as we speak.
This raises questions round how Nexos.ai handles such knowledge, on condition that it’s internet hosting every part by itself infrastructure. Okmanas stated the corporate will doubtless provide self-hosting sooner or later, and that it already helps integrations with firms’ personal inner LLMs.
It additionally has guardrails in place to detect when knowledge, akin to personally identifiable info (PII), is shipped to it — in such circumstances, it could actually re-route the info again to the originating firm’s personal LLMs or database. But when a question is generic, like a buyer asking an AI agent for particulars about their location and opening hours, then the question can be dealt with on the Nexos.ai facet.
From thought to inception
Going from an thought to formal incorporation took Nexos.ai round six weeks, and whereas the pace of securing the funding was largely right down to the founders’ pedigree, an enormous a part of it was merely the timing.
“I feel like we’ve finally gone beyond the hype of AI, and now the real-world applications are coming,” Seal added. “All the large enterprises are realizing this is really meaningful, and they need to adopt AI at scale. And now is the time for the infrastructure to catch up with the models.”
The pace of execution, although, was substantively as a result of broader organizational setup at Tesonet, which has round 4,000 staff throughout its portfolio. This enabled Okmanas to shortly assemble a crew of round 30 individuals who he knew and trusted to work on Nexos.ai full-time.
“We have these teams that can really join forces — they’ve been working together for so many years, there’s no need to tell them what’s what,” Okmanas stated. “We’ll also be hiring from the outside, but that takes much more time.”
Nexos.ai’s platform is ready to launch by the tip of March, although Okmanas stated it’s already working with a bunch of “beta customers and design partners.”
