Ex-Oracle and Google Engineers’ AI Startup Raises $7 mn Funding From Accel

Simplismart, founded by former Oracle and Google engineers, has raised $7 million in a Series A round led by Accel, with participation from Shastra VC, Titan Capital, and angel investors like Akshay Kothari, co-founder of Notion. 

This funding will accelerate the company’s R&D and expansion of its MLOps orchestration platform, designed to help enterprises deploy AI models with improved control over cost and performance.

As the AI landscape continues to grow, Simplismart claims to have built the world’s fastest inference engine, surpassing competitors like TogetherAI and FireworksAI. Despite operating with less than $1 million in initial funding, the startup’s engine enables businesses to optimise their AI models, allowing for rapid deployment while maintaining cost efficiency.

Amritanshu Jain, co-founder and CEO of Simplismart, emphasised the challenges enterprises face in adopting generative AI. “Enterprises struggle with bottlenecks like high costs, poor ROI, data privacy issues, and lack of control over their systems. Our platform helps them overcome these hurdles, offering a standardised, customizable solution,” Jain said.

Founded in 2022 by Jain, who worked on cloud infrastructure at Oracle Cloud, and Devansh Ghatak, an expert in search algorithms from Google Search, Simplismart has quickly made strides in the AI space. 

Simplismart’s inference engine optimises performance for all model deployments. For instance, its software-level optimisations enable Llama 3.1 8B to achieve a throughput of over 440 tokens per second. Unlike many competitors who rely on hardware or cloud-based solutions, Simplismart’s innovation lies in its MLOps platform, designed for on-premises enterprise deployments and flexible across different models and cloud platforms.

Simplismart’s platform offers a declarative language, similar to Terraform, simplifying the process of fine-tuning, deploying, and monitoring AI models at scale. It allows organisations to deploy generative AI models with optimised performance while keeping costs manageable, a key concern for businesses navigating the complexities of AI adoption.

Anand Daniel, Partner at Accel, praised the startup’s approach. “Simplismart has recognised the value of enabling developers to customise and deploy open-source models on their infrastructure, offering significant advantages in performance, cost control, and data privacy,” he said.

With the new funding, Simplismart aims to become a leader in the AI infrastructure market, enabling more companies to adopt and scale AI-powered applications.