Nvidia Backs Indian Startup Simplismart in $14M Series B Round

As the AI boom strains computing capacity, chip giant Nvidia has backed Indian startup Simplismart in a $14 million funding round. The deal values the four-year-old company at approximately $100 million, including the new funding. The all-primary Series B round was led by Dallas Venture Capital, with participation from Accel, Shastra VC, and Micromax.

Simplismart provides software that sits between AI models and the computing infrastructure they run on. Its platform automates the adjustment of model deployments to meet business requirements, optimizing factors such as response speed, request handling, and power consumption. This allows companies to get more out of their existing GPU stacks or, in some cases, use fewer GPUs.

"Nobody actually needs the fastest or the cheapest inference," said Amritanshu Jain, co-founder and CEO of Simplismart. He noted that companies need to run AI models at speeds and costs that make sense for their specific applications. According to TechCrunch, Simplismart claims its technology helped video-generation platform InVideo cut GPU serving costs by 56%. Other customers include HeyGen, Higgsfield, and Indian cloud provider Yotta.

While Nvidia is the dominant supplier of AI chips, backing software that can help companies run workloads with fewer GPUs presents an apparent paradox. Jain argued that making AI inference more efficient ultimately benefits Nvidia by making its hardware more attractive to customers and encouraging wider adoption of AI applications. Beyond the investment, Nvidia is collaborating with Simplismart on technical integrations, including around its Dynamo inference software.

Simplismart's annualized revenue run rate has grown 14-fold over the past six months to an eight-figure sum, Jain told TechCrunch. More than half of this revenue comes from the U.S., despite the startup having more customers in India.