Nvidia sells the GPUs everyone wants. So why is it investing in a startup that helps companies use fewer of them?
Bengaluru-based Simplismart has raised $14 million in an all-primary Series B round, TechCrunch reports. Dallas Venture Capital led the round, with Nvidia, Accel, Shastra VC and Micromax participating. The deal values the four-year-old startup at about $100 million including the new money.
What Simplismart does
Running AI models reliably and affordably at scale is hard. Different workloads need different trade-offs between speed, cost and performance. Simplismart’s software sits between AI models and the hardware they run on, and adjusts how models are deployed and managed to hit a customer’s targets, whether that’s response time, the number of requests handled or how much computing power is used.
Companies can use its own platform or run it inside their existing cloud or on-premises setup. It also offers fine-tuning, automatic scaling and monitoring, and lets cloud providers build their own AI inference services.
“Nobody actually needs the fastest or the cheapest inference,” co-founder and CEO Amritanshu Jain told TechCrunch. What companies need, he argues, is speed and cost that make sense for their specific application.
Customers and growth
Simplismart says it helped AI video platform InVideo cut GPU serving costs by 56%. It also works with HeyGen, Higgsfield and Ema, and Indian cloud provider Yotta uses its technology for the serverless inference service in its Shakti Studio platform.
Jain said annualised revenue run rate has grown 14-fold in six months to an eight-figure sum, without giving an exact figure. More than half of revenue comes from the US, even though the company has more customers in India. It employs 58 people.
The Nvidia angle
Beyond investing, Nvidia has worked with Simplismart on technical integrations, including around its Dynamo inference software, and has introduced it to potential customers. Jain’s view is that more efficient inference makes Nvidia hardware more attractive and encourages wider AI adoption.
The startup was founded in 2022 by Jain, a former Oracle engineer, and Devansh Ghatak, a former Google engineer, who met at BITS Pilani. It plans to use the money to expand in the US, grow the team and improve its software.
Why it matters
GPUs are scarce and expensive, and for most businesses the real AI bill comes from running models, not training them. Tools that squeeze more out of existing hardware can decide whether an AI feature is profitable. It’s also another sign that Indian deep-tech startups can win global customers and strategic investors, not just domestic ones.
Sources: TechCrunch. Written by the xRapid Media LLP team.
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