As this battle for global leadership in AI innovation heats up between the likes of United States, China, and Israel, India at least isn't fighting that battle. Instead, there's growing demand from businesses wanting to look for efficiencies, as well as from tech companies touting AI developments as a cure-all. According to a joint report by the IT industry body Nasscom and consulting firm BCG, the South Asian nation is projected to have an AI market touching $17 billion by 2027.

It is precisely this growth opportunity that Neysa, an Indian startup headed by seasoned tech entrepreneur Sharad Sanghi, wants to tap into. The company now offers its AI solutions to local and multinational businesses across the country.

The Mumbai-based startup provides AI and machine learning infrastructure and platform as a service to enterprise customers on the basis of their requirements. Dedicated machine learning operations and infrastructure consulting teams are also in place to help customers find the appropriate size for their infrastructure and fine-tune or customize the models they choose.

Sanghi spent more than 27 years at his previous venture and data center provider, Netmagic, which Japan's NTT Data acquired in 2016. In 2022, Sanghi had planned to focus on cloud infrastructure and AI but could not. He has resigned as the managing director and CEO of Netmagic in June this year to begin afresh with Neysa with his former colleague Anindya Das in 2023.

"I started at Neysa with a view of providing infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, inference as a service, the services layer around ML, as well as the platforms that we need for developers," he said in an interview.

Neysa was initially an infrastructure service provider and has its flagship platform, Velocis, since July, as an on-demand access product for computing infrastructure. However, it intends to expand its product portfolio into the developer platform and inference-as-a-service by year's end. "We have started work on building an 'observability for better management' of our infrastructure and securing AI workloads," said Sanghi.

With the entire gamut of its offerings in the offing, Neysa plans to take on global hyperscalers, which include the traditional cloud service providers such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure apart from the newer entrants like CoreWeave and Lambda Labs. According to Sanghi, this makes the startup different from the existing players as it offers "flexibility" in its models.

"We can offer both public cloud and private clusters. It's also the open-source nature of our offering. All our platforms are built on open-source platforms… so there's no lock-in for clients," he said.

The startup's consultation service also aims at attracting local businesses that, he claims, have difficulty getting the right infrastructure without having to pay thousands of dollars.

"Very often, clients come to us and say they want so many GPUs… and when we really look at the requirement, they do not need half the amount they had asked," Sanghi said.

Neysa has raised all-equity $30 million Series A round co-led by existing investors NTTVC, Z47 previously Matrix Partners India, and Nexus Venture Partners. This represents the follow-up for the seed round the startup secured earlier in the year, which was $20 million.

Fresh funding will also help augment Neysa's infrastructure, enhance its R&D, and broaden go-to-market. Funds will also set a base for launching its integrated Gen AI acceleration cloud service," said Sanghi.

The startup presently has a headcount of 55 people, which it intends to grow further by adding additional engineers and staff to strengthen direct and indirect sales.

Neysa currently boasts around 12 paying customers and operates about six large proof-of-concepts. As much as 70 percent of its entire customer base has opted for the private cluster, while the remaining 30 percent is on a public cloud, said Sanghi. 

While Sanghi did not disclose the names of the users of Neysa's service, he mentioned that the startup essentially caters to three broad categories : research institutes, AI-native startups, and enterprise customers, with initial concentration in banking, manufacturing, and media.

Neysa's customers are currently based out of India, though Sanghi said the startup plans to enter global markets with its next round of funding. Talks for that, he noted, are already under way and he expects it to close in the next six to nine months.

He wouldn't say exactly how much Neysa is looking to raise in its next round, but he said it would be "in an order of magnitude more than what we've currently raised." The company will also raise debt to help meet its growing needs for GPUs and other infrastructure.