Nvidia has invested in Indian AI infrastructure startup Simplismart as part of a $14 million Series B funding round, backing technology designed to help businesses run artificial intelligence models more efficiently and reduce computing costs.
The funding round also included Accel, Shastra VC and Micromax, with Dallas Venture Capital leading the investment. The Bengaluru-based startup, founded in 2022, is valued at approximately $100 million following the funding.
As businesses invest heavily in graphics processing units (GPUs) to power AI applications, operating models reliably and cost-effectively at scale remains a challenge. Simplismart aims to address this by automating model deployment and optimisation, helping companies balance speed, performance and computing costs without manually configuring their infrastructure.
“Nobody actually needs the fastest or the cheapest inference,” said Amritanshu Jain, co-founder and CEO of Simplismart. He explained that businesses need AI models to operate at speeds and costs suited to their specific applications.
Simplismart’s platform sits between AI models and the computing infrastructure supporting them. It optimises response times, request-handling capacity and computing resource consumption, allowing businesses to make better use of their existing GPU infrastructure.
The company enables customers to deploy AI models through its platform or within their existing cloud and on-premises environments. Its offerings also include model fine-tuning, automatic scaling of computing resources and performance monitoring. Cloud providers can use its software to build and operate AI inference services on GPU infrastructure.
Simplismart said its technology helped AI video-generation platform InVideo reduce GPU serving costs by 56%. Its customers also include AI video companies HeyGen and Higgsfield, enterprise AI startup Ema, and Indian cloud provider Yotta, which uses its technology for the serverless AI inference service within its Shakti Studio platform.
According to Jain, the startup’s annualised revenue run rate increased 14-fold over the past 6 months, reaching an 8-figure sum. The figure reflects recent customer usage rather than contracted recurring revenue and excludes payments passed through to infrastructure providers. He did not disclose the exact amount.
More than half of the company’s revenue comes from the United States, despite having a larger customer base in India, Jain said.
Alongside its investment, Nvidia has worked with Simplismart on technical integrations involving its Dynamo inference software. The collaboration includes work between Simplismart’s engineers and Nvidia’s solutions architects. Nvidia has also helped connect the startup with potential customers and partners.
Although Nvidia is a leading supplier of AI chips, its investment in software that can reduce GPU requirements for some workloads may appear counterintuitive. Jain argued that more efficient inference could make Nvidia’s hardware more attractive and encourage wider adoption of AI applications.
Simplismart operates in a competitive market alongside offerings from Nvidia, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, as well as other startups developing tools to make AI inference faster and more cost-effective.
“Where we tend to win is where people have to be more stringent on their SLAs [service-level agreements] and TCO [total cost of ownership],” Jain said. He added that the platform seeks to balance performance and cost according to each customer’s requirements.
Jain, a former Oracle engineer, founded Simplismart with former Google engineer Devansh Ghatak. The pair met while studying at BITS Pilani. The company now employs 58 people.
Simplismart plans to use the new funding to expand its presence in the United States, increase its workforce and continue developing its AI inference software.
The funding announcement follows a report by an Indian business publication that the startup was in talks to raise $40 million to $50 million at a valuation of $300 million to $400 million. Jain declined to comment on the report, stating that the company was not actively fundraising and that its Series B round had closed without plans for an extension.
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