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A new AI orchestration startup from the founders of the Lithuanian unicorn North Security is committed to helping companies bring their AI projects into production, with an initial focus on bringing greater visibility, security and adaptability to large language models (LLM).
Nexos.aias the startup is called, it is the work of the hand Tomas Okmanas (pictured above) and Eimantas Sabaliauskaswhich has built one of the most recognized brands not only in Lithuania, but throughout Europe. Nord Security, best known for its flagship VPN product NordVPN, started its way through its first 10 years ago. yield to an investment of 100 million dollars in 2022 at a valuation of $1.6 billion.
His new company came out of stealth today with $8 million in funding from a slew of high-profile backers, including major investors. Index Ventureswhich has now made its first investment in Lithuania.
“We have known Tomas and the work he has done for several years, so as soon as we heard that he was building a new company in the AI space, and he was finally willing to take venture capital money at this stage (before ) , we were very anxious,” the Index Ventures partner Hannah Seal he 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.
The capitalization of a catalyst
Currently, teams that want to put their AI into production have to connect a myriad of tools, which likely involves recruiting and building teams with the necessary skills. This is where Nexos.ai wants to intervene.
“I saw that there is a big gap between running AI as pilots and going into production,” Okmanas told TechCrunch in an interview. “When you test AI in your laboratory, it might work and it might be useful, but when you want to put it into production, especially in companies, how do you ensure high availability? How do you ensure security? How do you manage costs?”
Nord Security has been around for more than a decade, but five years ago, it was folded into an umbrella company called Tesonetaan incubator with a portfolio of more than two dozen companies. One of these is a web hosting company Hostingerwhich he recently added AI-enabled intelligence to its website builder tool. Okmanas, a board member and shareholder at Hostinger, said some of the problems they encountered served as a catalyst for what would eventually become Nexos.ai.
“We wanted to employ AI in our website builder, so we enabled OpenAI, started testing, and put it into production,” Okmanas said. “In August, we had $150,000 in sales. Why? Why was it so expensive? There was no visibility.”
And when OpenAI crashed a handful of times, Okmanas was convinced that something had to be done to make it easier to implement, manage and optimize the “increasingly complex ecosystem of AI models” that organizations might need.
Through a simple API (application programming interface), customers can access over 200 AI models, from big names like OpenAI and Anthropic to smaller 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 any reason, a company can switch to another to keep its costs down.
Nexos.ai also introduces “intelligent caching” into the mix – if a particular query is repeated by many users, the system can return to its own database instead of continuing to engage the LLM, which can be expensive.
On the security and compliance fronts, 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.
There’s no escaping the elephant in the room, though: one of the reasons companies have been hesitant to embrace AI is the thorny issue of data security – healthcare companies, banks or insurance companies simply cannot trust LLM providers with all their sensitive information. It is worth noting that Hostinger itself was hit with a data breach in 2019 and NordVPN it was also hacked in the past – the kind of attacks that all companies face today.
This raises questions about how Nexos.ai manages such 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.
It also has guardrails in place to detect when data, such as personally identifiable information (PII), is sent to it – in these cases, it can redirect the data to the LLM or the originating company’s database. But if a request is generic, such as a customer asking an AI agent for details about their location and opening hours, then the request 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 down to the pedigree of the founders, a large part was just timing.
“I feel like we’ve finally moved beyond the AI hype, and now the real-world applications are coming,” Seal added. “All large companies understand that this is really significant, and they need to adopt AI at scale. And now is the time for the infrastructure to take the models.”
The speed of the execution, however, was substantially due to the wider setup of the organization in Tesonet, which has about 4,000 employees in its portfolio. This allowed 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 really join forces – they’ve been working together for so many years, there’s no need to say what it is,” Okmanas said. “We also hire from outside, but that takes a lot more time.”
Nexos.ai’s platform is set to launch at the end of March, though Okmanas said it’s already working with a bunch of “beta customers and design partners.”
