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A new AI orchestration startup from Lithuanian unicorn founders Nord Security aims to help enterprises put their AI projects into production, with an initial focus on bringing greater visibility, security and adaptability to large language models (LLM).
Nexos.aias the beginning is called, it is handmade Thomas Okmanas (pictured above) and Eimantas Sabaliauskasestablished one of the most recognized brands not only in Lithuania, but throughout Europe. Known for its top VPN product, NordVPN, Nord Security has been leading the way for the first 10 years before this. Withstood the investment of 100 million dollars Worth $1.6 billion in 2022.
Their new company is going undercover today with $8 million in funding from a number of high-profile backers, including a lead investor. Index Entitieshas now made its first investment in Lithuania.
“We’ve known about Thomas and the work he’s been doing for years, so as soon as we heard that he was starting a new company in artificial intelligence and was finally willing to take on venture capital at this (early) stage. , we were very enthusiastic,” a partner at Index Ventures Hannah Seal told TechCrunch.
Other notable investors included Creandum and Dig Ventures, and prominent angels such as the CEOs of Datadog, Klarna, Supercell and Wix.
Capitalization of the catalyst
Currently, teams looking to put their AI into production must integrate multiple tools, which will likely involve hiring and building teams with the right skills. This is where Nexos.ai wants to step in.
“I saw that there was a huge gap between piloting AI and going into production,” Okmanas told TechCrunch. “When you’re testing AI in your lab, it can work and be useful, but how do you ensure high availability when you want to bring it to production, especially in enterprises? 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 became an umbrella company. Tesonetincubator a briefcase more than two dozen enterprises. One of them is a web hosting company Hostingerrecently added AI-powered smarts to website building tool. Okmanas, a Hostinger board member and shareholder, said some of the challenges they faced served as a catalyst for their eventual transformation into Nexos.ai.
“We wanted to use artificial intelligence in our website builder, so we launched OpenAI, started testing, and rolled it out to production,” Okmanas said. “We were paid $150,000 in August. Why? Why was it so expensive? There was no visibility.”
When OpenAI took off several times, Okmanas became convinced that something needed to be done to make it easier to deploy, 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, niche LLMs. The idea is that if OpenAI takes off, the company can temporarily (and automatically) switch to another provider without breaking stride. Or, if the cost to access a particular LLM explodes for whatever reason, the company may switch to another to cut costs.
Nexos.ai also introduces “smart caching” into the mix – if a particular question is repeated by multiple users, the system can refer to its own database instead of continuing to deal with LLM, which can be expensive.
On the security and compliance fronts, Nexos.ai prevents individuals from sending personal information to LLM providers, or if an employee leaves the company, their access can be terminated immediately.
The elephant in the room can’t be avoided: One of the reasons enterprises were hesitant to move to AI is a difficult issue of data security – healthcare companies, banks or insurance companies cannot trust LLM providers with all their sensitive data. It should be noted that Hostinger was itself It was hit by a data breach in 2019 and NordVPN is also broken in the past — the type of attacks that all companies face today.
This raises questions about how Nexos.ai manages such data, given that it hosts everything on its own infrastructure. Okmanas said the company will offer self-hosting in the future and already supports integration with companies’ own internal LLMs.
It also has safeguards in place to detect when data such as personally identifiable information (PII) is sent to it – in which case it can redirect the data to the originating company’s own LLMs or databases. But if the request is general, for example, a customer asks an AI agent for details about their location and business hours, then the request will be handled on the Nexos.ai side.
From idea to inception
It took Nexos.ai about six weeks to go from idea to formal incorporation, and while the speed of funding largely depended on the pedigree of the founders, a large part of it was simply time.
“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 it really makes sense and they need to adopt AI at scale. And now it’s time for the infrastructure to catch up with the models.”
The speed of implementation was due to the broader organizational structure of Tesonet, which has approximately 4,000 employees in its portfolio. This allowed Okmanas to quickly assemble a team of about 30 people he knew and trusted to work full-time on Nexos.ai.
“We have these teams that can really join forces — they’ve been working together for years, they don’t need to be told what’s what,” Okmanas said. “We will also hire from outside, but it takes more time.”
The Nexos.ai platform won’t launch until the end of March, though Okmanas says it’s already working with a bunch of “beta customers and design partners.”
