Nvidia is in advanced talks to lead a $20 million funding round in generative artificial intelligence startup Simplismart at a valuation of around $100 million, as the US chipmaking giant doubles down on India’s emerging AI infrastructure ecosystem, people aware of the matter told ET.
The projected valuation would mark a fourfold jump from the roughly $25 million at which Simplismart raised $7 million in October 2024. Existing investor Accel is also expected to participate in the round, while at least one new investor is likely to join the financing, the people said.
Nvidia and Simplismart did not respond to ET’s queries till press time Sunday.
Simplismart, which has offices in Bengaluru and San Francisco, counts Snapdeal founder Kunal Bahl’s Titan Capital, Dallas Venture Capital, LetsVenture and angel investors like Notion cofounder Akshay Kothari among its investors.
Founded in 2022 by former Oracle and Google engineers Amritanshu Jain and Devansh Ghatak, Simplismart helps companies build and deploy production-grade AI systems and manage the development lifecycle without writing code.
It builds software tools that help enterprises deploy, manage and optimise AI models in production environments. According to the company, its inference-focused platform is designed to improve GPU utilisation and reduce the cost of running generative AI applications at scale.
The startup’s platform supports large language models, small language models, vision-language models, speech recognition systems and text-to-image and video models. Its customers include Tata 1mg, Mindtickle, InVideo and Dashtoon.
Earlier this year, Simplismart said its AI inference platform would be made available on Nvidia infrastructure as the startup expanded its enterprise AI offerings. The company has also been working with Nvidia Inference Microservices (NIM), which allows enterprises to deploy containerised AI models as managed production endpoints with greater governance and cost control.
The investment talks come as Nvidia expands its footprint in India’s AI ecosystem through cloud partnerships, startup collaborations and investments in companies building enterprise AI infrastructure. In FY26, about 22-24% of the total deals of 1,020 were in AI/ML startups, as per Tracxn data.
The potential deal also adds to a growing pipeline of large AI-native funding rounds in India. Startups such as Neysa, Emergent and Sarvam AI have either raised or are in talks to raise significant capital as investors increasingly back companies building foundational AI infrastructure and enterprise AI applications.
ET had reported that Sarvam AI was in talks to raise $300-350 million. Emergent recently raised a $70 million round led by investors including SoftBank and Khosla Ventures.
