Nvidia joins investors in $14 mn Simplismart funding

Bengaluru: AI infrastructure startup Simplismart has raised $14 million led by Dallas Venture Capital, with Nvidia among the investors, to expand its software that helps businesses run AI applications more efficiently.Accel, Shastra VC and Micromax also participated in the round. The company did not disclose its valuation following the funding. The proceeds will support product development, cloud partnerships and expansion across North America and other markets.TOI first reported on April 11 that NVentures, Nvidia’s venture capital arm, was investing in Simplismart as part of the funding round.Simplismart focuses on inference, the process through which a trained AI model responds to a request, such as generating a video or answering a question. Its software helps companies manage the speed, cost and reliability of AI models across cloud services and their own infrastructure.“The advantage comes from how you run them: what each interaction costs, how quickly the application responds, and whether it stays reliable as demand grows,” said Amritanshu Jain, co-founder and CEO.The company said its annualised revenue run rate grew 14-fold over six months, without disclosing the revenue figure. A run rate projects annual revenue based on performance over a shorter period. Its customers include HeyGen, Higgsfield, InVideo, Shiprocket, Apna and Ema.Simplismart cited customer communications platform Exotel as an example of potential savings. Exotel adapted an open-source model using its own data and moved it to Simplismart after finding proprietary-model services too expensive, according to the announcement.Simplismart said it reduced Exotel’s cost per minute by up to 57% compared with those services, while cutting response times from 1.1 seconds to under 300 milliseconds.Unlike providers that buy or reserve computing capacity and resell it, Simplismart does not own computing capacity. Instead, it supplies software that enables cloud companies to offer AI services using their graphics processing units (GPUs) without building the software themselves.Yotta is using the offering for Shakti Studio, allowing customers to run AI models without managing the underlying infrastructure, the company said.Co-founder and chief technology officer Devansh Ghatak said the funding would also support the development of software to match AI workloads with available GPU capacity across regions and time zones, helping cloud providers use their existing equipment more efficiently.You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.