NVIDIA, Dallas VC, others invest $14 million in Bengaluru-based Simplismart at $100 million valuation

Bengaluru-based AI inference infrastructure startup Simplismart has raised $14 million in a Series B funding round led by Dallas Venture Capital, with participation from NVIDIA, Accel, Shastra VC, Micromax and angel investors.

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The deal values the four-year-old startup at about $100 million post-money, and the round was entirely primary, meaning all of the money is fresh capital going into the startup.

Simplismart said it will use the money to strengthen its inference engine and orchestration platform, expand its network of cloud provider partners and support growth in North America and other global markets.

“We’ve built the infrastructure that makes model capability commercially usable,” Jain said in the company’s funding announcement.

Simplismart was founded in 2022 by Jain, who previously worked on cloud infrastructure at Oracle, and Ghatak, who worked on search algorithms at Google.

What Simplismart does

AI inference is the stage where a trained model is actually put to work, answering a query, generating a video or producing a voice clip. Every such request runs on GPUs, and the cost, speed and quality of that output depend heavily on how the model is deployed.

Simplismart builds the software layer that sits between AI models and the GPUs they run on. Its inference engine lets a business set how a model should run based on its speed, cost and performance needs, while its orchestration platform handles deployment and scaling across cloud and on-premises infrastructure.

“We have spent four years building the software layer between the model and the GPU, helping customers optimise how their workloads are deployed and operated. This funding will allow us to take that platform to more enterprises and cloud providers globally,” Jain said.

The company’s pitch is that customers do not need the absolute fastest or cheapest setup, but one matched to their use case. “Nobody actually needs the fastest or cheapest inference,”Jain told TechCrunch.

It gave one example in its announcement. For enterprise AI company Ema, it took a target of 200 milliseconds of latency at 9 cents per million tokens and delivered a production setup running at 180 milliseconds and 7 cents per million tokens. That is roughly 22% cheaper per token than the target. The company also claims it cut AI video platform InVideo’s GPU serving costs by 56%.

Working with cloud providers

Unlike inference providers that buy or reserve GPU capacity and resell it, Simplismart does not own computing infrastructure. Its software lets cloud providers turn their existing GPUs into managed AI services sold under their own brands.

Indian cloud provider Yotta is one such partner. Simplismart powers the serverless inference layer of Yotta’s Shakti Studio, which lets customers run AI models without managing the infrastructure underneath.

The company said it is also working with cloud providers and sovereign AI programmes across India, North America, the Middle East, Australia and East Asia.

Part of the new money will go into a dynamic GPU scheduling layer that matches AI workloads with available computing capacity across regions and time zones, co-founder and CTO Devansh Ghatak said.

Why NVIDIA is investing

NVIDIA’s role goes beyond the cheque. Jain said Simplismart engineers and NVIDIA solutions architects have worked on technical integrations, including around NVIDIA’s Dynamo inference software, and that NVIDIA has introduced the startup to potential customers and partners.

Simplismart’s software can help companies run some workloads with fewer GPUs. Jain argued that more efficient inference could still help NVIDIA by making its hardware more attractive and encouraging wider use of AI applications.

Simplismart competes with inference offerings from NVIDIA itself, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

“Inferencing is emerging as one of the biggest game changers in AI economics,” said Dayakar Puskoor, managing partner at Dallas Venture Capital.

The startup raised less than $1 million before its $7 million Series A in October 2024. That round was led by Accel, with participation from Shastra VC, Titan Capital and angels including Notion co-founder Akshay Kothari.

At the time of the Series A, Jain had said the company expected to reach $5 million in revenue by the first quarter of 2025.

With the Series B, Simplismart’s total funding comes to about $21 million.