Powering infrastructure for Open Source AI: Our investment in Simplismart

Today, we're excited to announce our Series A in Simplismart, an AI infrastructure company building the critical platform-agnostic middleware to deploy, train/customize, and serve open-source AI models in production.

As GenAI undergoes its Cambrian explosion moment across businesses worldwide, developers find themselves at a crucial crossroads: use off-the-shelf foundation model APIs, or customize & deploy open-source models on their infrastructure. The latter holds significant merit for developers who want to prioritize control over their model serving environment & costs, customizability over proprietary data, flexibility in the backend stack, and high levels of privacy/security. However, some where between optimizing low-level libraries and application serving logic for robustness & concurrency, it gets incredibly hard to build that infrastructure in-house. That’s where Simplismart comes in.

When Amritanshu & Devansh first showed us their (then) bare-bones platform, we were blown away by two facts: (1) they had silently managed to build the fastest & cheapest inference engine for any encoder-decoder model by going deep into serving & compiling layers over the last three years (2) every part of the stack was designed from the get-go to be modular & unopinionated about hardware/cloud vendors, giving the highest level of controllability to users who want to optimize across accuracy, costs, latency, throughput & concurrency based on their custom needs. With a tiny team, they had already begun serving some of India’s fastest-growing GenAI companies in production. It furthered our belief that Simplismart has a shot at winning in the massive but fiercely competitive global AI infrastructure market.

Within just a few months of our investment, Simplismart has already tripled its revenue and is adding marquee customer logos every week. We’re delighted to be early partners in this promising infrastructure solution from India for the world and wish them all the best for the journey ahead!