Nvidia joins $14 million funding round for Simplismart, a startup that helps companies run AI models with fewer GPUs

What happened

Nvidia has invested in Simplismart, a startup based in Bengaluru, India, as part of a $14 million funding round, TechCrunch reported on October 27. The company makes software designed to help businesses run AI models more efficiently and, in some cases, with fewer GPUs.

Dallas Venture Capital led the all-primary Series B round, according to TechCrunch. Nvidia joined Accel, Shastra VC and Micromax as participants. The deal values the four-year-old company at about $100 million, a figure that includes the new money.

What Simplismart's software does

Sitting between models and hardware

Companies are spending heavily on GPUs for AI applications, but running models reliably and economically at scale is still a challenge, TechCrunch reported. Different workloads call for different balances of speed, cost and performance, and getting models to meet business needs often takes complex adjustments. Simplismart says its software automates much of that work on a customer's existing computing infrastructure.

The company says it can tune how quickly a model responds, how many requests it handles and how much computing power it consumes. Customers can run models on Simplismart's own platform or inside their existing cloud and on-premises systems. The company also offers tools to fine-tune models, scale resources automatically and monitor performance, and cloud providers can use its software to build their own AI inference services.

Customers and claimed results

Simplismart says it helped AI video-generation platform InVideo cut its GPU serving costs by 56%. TechCrunch reported that the startup also works with AI video companies HeyGen and Higgsfield and with enterprise AI startup Ema. Indian cloud provider Yotta uses its technology to power a serverless AI inference service in its Shakti Studio platform.

"Nobody actually needs the fastest or the cheapest inference," co-founder and CEO Amritanshu Jain told TechCrunch. He said companies instead need to run models at speeds and costs that make sense for their specific applications.

Why Nvidia would back it

TechCrunch noted an apparent paradox. Nvidia, the dominant supplier of AI chips, is funding software that can help companies run some workloads with fewer GPUs. Jain argued that more efficient inference could ultimately benefit Nvidia by making its hardware more attractive to customers and encouraging wider adoption of AI applications.

Beyond the investment, Jain told TechCrunch that the two companies are working on technical integrations, including around Nvidia's Dynamo inference software. He said the work involves Simplismart's engineers and Nvidia's solutions architects, and that Nvidia has introduced the startup to potential customers and partners.

A crowded market

According to TechCrunch, Simplismart competes with Nvidia's own offerings and with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. It also faces a growing number of startups building tools to make AI models faster and cheaper to run. Jain said the company tends to win when customers face strict service-level agreements and tight total cost of ownership targets.

Revenue, team and plans

Growth figures

Jain told TechCrunch that Simplismart's annualized revenue run rate has grown 14-fold over the past six months to an eight-figure sum, but he did not disclose the exact number. The company said the figure reflects recent customer usage rather than contracted recurring revenue. It also excludes revenue passed through to infrastructure providers.

More than half of the company's revenue comes from the U.S., even though it has more customers in India, Jain said. He founded the company in 2022 with Devansh Ghatak. Jain previously worked as an engineer at Oracle and Ghatak at Google, and the two met while studying at BITS Pilani. The startup now employs 58 people.

Simplismart plans to use the new money to expand in the U.S., grow its team and keep developing its inference software, TechCrunch reported. Jain called the U.S. a key market. More coverage of the industry is on our AI and tech page.

What to watch next

• How Simplismart uses the new funding to expand its U.S. presence and grow its team.
• Progress on the technical integration work with Nvidia, including around its Dynamo inference software.
• Whether the company raises more money. The Economic Times reported talks to raise $40 million to $50 million, but Jain said Simplismart was not actively fundraising and the Series B was closed.