A new AI orchestration startup from the founders of Lithuanian unicorn Nord Security is aiming to help enterprises put their AI projects into production, with an initial focus on bringing greater visibility, security and adaptability to large language patterns (LLM).
Nexos.ai, as the startup is called, is the work of Tomas Okmanas (pictured above) and Eimantas Sabaliauskas, who built one of the most popular brands not only in Lithuania, but throughout Europe. Nord Security, best known for its flagship VPN product NordVPN, had its way in the first 10 years before surrendering to a $100 million investment in 2022 at a $1.6 billion valuation (later reaching a $3 billion valuation during a subsequent fundraising).
Their new company is walking away from the heist 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’ve known about Thomas and the work he’s done for many years, so we just heard that he was building a new company in the AI space, and he was finally ready to take on venture capital money at this stage ( early). , we were very keen,” Index Ventures partner Hannah Seal told TechCrunch.
Other notable investors include Creandum and Dig Ventures, and prominent angels such as the CEOs of Datadog, Klarna, Supercell and Wix also participated.
Capitalizing on a catalyst
Currently, teams that want to put their AI into production must connect a multitude of tools, which will likely include recruiting and building teams with the necessary skills. This is where Nexos.ai wants to intervene.
“I’ve seen that there’s a big gap between driving AI as pilots and going into production,” Okmanas told TechCrunch in an interview. “When you’re testing AI in your lab, it can work and it can be useful, but when you want to put it into production, especially in the enterprise, how do you ensure high availability? How do you ensure security? How do you manage the cost?”
Nord Security has been around for more than a decade, but five years ago, it folded into an umbrella company called Tesonet, an incubator with a portfolio of more than two dozen businesses. One of them is web hosting firm Hostinger, which recently added AI-enabled intelligence to its website building tool. Okmanas, a Hostinger board member and shareholder, said some of the issues they encountered served as a catalyst for what would eventually become Nexos.ai.
“We wanted to use AI in our website builder, so we enabled OpenAI, started testing it, and put it into production,” Okmanas said. “In August, we had $150,000 billed. For what? Why was it so expensive? There was no visibility.”
And when OpenAI crashed several times, Okmanas was convinced that something had to be done to make it easier to deploy, manage and optimize the “increasingly complex ecosystems of AI models” that organizations might need.
Through a simple API (application programming interface), customers can access more than 200 AI models, from big-name operators like OpenAI and Anthropic to smaller, niche LLMs. The idea is, if OpenAI goes down, a company can temporarily (and automatically) switch to another provider without breaking the bank. Or if the costs involved in accessing a specific LLM explode for whatever reason, a company may switch to another to keep their costs down.
Nexos.ai also brings “intelligent memory” into the mix – if a particular query is repeated by many users, the system can fall back on its database instead of continuing to engage LLM, which can be costly.
In terms of security and compliance, Nexos.ai also prevents individuals from sending private data to LLM providers, or if an employee leaves a company, their access can be terminated immediately.
The elephant in the room can’t be avoided, however: One of the reasons enterprises have been reluctant to embrace AI is the thorny issue of data security — healthcare companies, banks or insurance firms can’t simply trust providers of LLM all their sensitive information. . It’s worth noting that Hostinger itself was hit with a data breach in 2019, and NordVPN has also been hacked in the past – the kind of attacks that all companies face today.
This raises questions about how Nexos.ai handles such data, given that it hosts everything on its own infrastructure. Okmanas said the company will likely offer self-hosting in the future and already supports integrations with companies’ internal LLMs.
It also has safeguards in place to detect when data, such as personally identifiable information (PII), is sent to it – in such cases, it may redirect the data back to LLMs or its database data of the initial company. But if a question is general, like a customer asking an AI agent for details about their location and opening hours, then the question will be handled on the Nexos.ai side.
From the idea to the beginning
Going from an idea to formal incorporation took Nexos.ai about six weeks, and while the speed of securing funding was largely due to the founders’ pedigree, a large part of it was simply timing.
“I feel like we’ve finally moved beyond the AI hype and now the real-world applications are coming,” Seal added. “All large enterprises are realizing that this really makes sense and they need to adopt AI at scale. And now is the time for the infrastructure to catch up with the models.”
The speed of execution, however, was largely due to the broader organizational setup at Tesonet, which has around 4,000 employees across its portfolio. This enabled Okmanas to quickly assemble a team of about 30 people he knew and trusted to work on Nexos.ai full-time.
“We have these teams that can join forces — they’ve been working together for so many years, we don’t need to tell them what it is,” Okmanas said. “We will also hire from abroad, but that takes a lot more time.”
Nexos.ai’s platform is set to launch by the end of March, though Okmanas said it’s already working with a bunch of “beta customers and design partners.”
