A new AI orchestration startup from the founders of Lithuanian unicorn Nord Security It aims to help organizations bring their AI projects into production, with an initial focus on achieving greater visibility, security, and adaptability of large language models (LLMs).
Nexos.aias a startup is called, is manual labor Thomas Okmanas (pictured above) and Imantas Sabaliauskaswhich has built one of the most famous brands not only in Lithuania, but throughout Europe. Nord Security, best known for its flagship VPN product NordVPN, fought its way through the first 10 years before succumbing to a massive $100 million investment in 2022 at a $1.6 billion valuation (it later reached $100 million). $3 billion valuation during subsequent fundraising).
Their new company emerges from stealth today with $8 million in funding from a slew of high-profile backers, including lead investor Index Ventures, which has now made its first-ever investment in Lithuania.
“We have known about Thomas and the work he has done for many years, so once we heard that he was building a new company in the AI space, he was finally willing to take venture capital money into this [early] “At this point, we were very excited,” Index Ventures partner Hannah’s seal TechCrunch said.
Other notable investors include Creandum and Dig Ventures, and notable angels such as the CEOs of Datadog, Klarna, Supercell and Wix also participated.
Take advantage of the catalyst
Currently, teams that want to put their AI into production must tie together a myriad of tools, which will likely include hiring and building teams with the necessary skills. This is where Nexos.ai wants to step in.
“I saw that there was a big gap between running AI as pilots and getting into production,” Okmanas told TechCrunch in an interview. “When you test AI in your lab, it might work and it can be useful, but when you want to put it into production, especially in enterprise, how do you ensure high availability? How do you guarantee security? How do you manage cost?”
Nord Security has been around for more than a decade, but five years ago, it was merged into an umbrella company called Nord Security tysoniteincubator with file For more than twenty companies. One of these companies is web hosting Hostingerwhich was added recently AI-powered intelligence for its website building tool. Okmanas, a board member and shareholder at Hostinger, said some of the issues they faced served as a catalyst for what would eventually become Nexos.ai.
“We wanted to put AI into our website builder, so we turned on OpenAI, started testing it, and put it into production,” Okmanas said. “In August, we received a bill for $150,000. Why? Why was it so expensive? There was no visibility.”
When OpenAI went down several times, Okmanas was convinced that something had to be done to make it easier to deploy, manage, and improve the “increasingly complex ecosystem of AI models” that organizations would need.
Through a simple API (Application Programming Interface), customers have access to over 200 AI models, from big-name companies like OpenAI and Anthropic to smaller, niche LLM programs. The idea is that if OpenAI goes down, the company can temporarily (and automatically) switch to another provider without interruption. Or if the costs associated with achieving a particular MBA rise for any reason, the company can move to another company to keep its costs low.
Nexos.ai is also introducing “intelligent caching” into the mix – if a particular question is repeated by multiple users, the system can turn to its own database instead of continuing to engage LLM, which can be costly.
On the security and compliance front, Nexos.ai also prevents individuals from sending private data to LLM providers, or if an employee leaves the company, their access can be terminated immediately.
There’s no escaping the elephant in the room, though: One reason companies are hesitant to embrace AI is the thorny issue of data security — healthcare companies, banks, or insurance companies can’t simply trust LLM providers with all their sensitive information. . It’s worth noting that Hostinger itself suffered a data breach in 2019, and NordVPN was also hacked in the past – the type of attacks that all businesses face today.
This raises questions about how Nexos.ai handles this data, since it hosts everything on its own infrastructure. Okmanas said the company will likely offer self-hosting in the future, and that it already supports integrations with companies’ internal LLMs.
They also have guardrails to detect when data, such as personally identifiable information (PII), is being sent to them – in such cases, they can redirect the data back to the original company’s LLMs or database. But if the query is general, such as a customer asking the AI agent for details about their location and business hours, the query will be handled on the Nexos.ai side.
From idea to beginning
It took Nexos.ai about six weeks to go from idea to formal founding, and while the speed of securing funding was largely down to the pedigree of the founders, a large part of it was simply timing.
“I feel like we’re finally getting past the AI hype, and now the real-world applications are coming,” Seal added. “All the big companies realize that this is really useful, and they need to adopt AI at scale. Now is the time for infrastructure to catch up with the models.”
However, the speed of implementation is largely due to the broader organizational setup at Tesonet, which has around 4,000 employees in its portfolio. This enabled Okmanas to quickly assemble a team of about 30 people he knew and trusted to work on Nexos.ai.
“We have these teams that can really join forces — they’ve worked together for so many years, there’s no need to tell them what’s up,” Okmanas said. “We will also hire from abroad, but that takes much longer.”
The Nexos.ai platform is scheduled to launch by the end of March, though Okmanas said it is already working with a group of “beta customers and design partners.”