Sheryl Sandberg, former Meta's Chief Operating Officer (COO), has invested in Bangalore-based GenAI start-up Simplysmart for the second time.
She was part of the funding round led by Accel. This could see the company's valuation reach $35 million according to Times of India.
As per the latest Tracxn data, the company has so far raised $7.14 million in two funding rounds. The company’s seed round was held in July at a post-money valuation of $1.54 million.
Simplismart was founded in 2022 by Amritanshu Jain and Devansh Ghatak. The company services enable the users to build, deploy and observe deep learning models with minimal code. It also helps the customers in deploying GenAI models using its high-speed inference engine at scalable and cost-effective costs.
Advertisement
Some of its customers include Vodex, Dubverse, and mobavenue as some of its customers.
Accel, Anicut Capital, and Titan Capital are some of the company's major investors and serve in the B2B segment.
The startup competes with Veritone, Comet, and DataRobot.
Prior to launching Simplismart, Jain held machine learning engineer roles at Oracle and Capillary Technologies. Devansh Ghatak, on the other hand, worked in multiple engineering roles at Avamo and Google.
Reportedly, Sandberg got to know about the start-up through a client of Iconiq Capital, a US investment management firm that has funded companies like Flipkart.
Sandberg has also invested in another GenAI startup Ema, that enhances productivity across roles by automating complex workflows, through simple conversation. The company’s no-code platform allows users to build and deploy custom AI agents (personas) using language.
Advertisement
The number of GenAI startups in the country has more than doubled from 2021 to 2023 as per a study by NASSCOM. This is evident from the surge in funding in such startups since December 2023.
Half a dozen early-stage AI generative start-ups have raised nearly $100 million in funding in the past six months. It includes Sarvam AI, Ema, Neysa, Vodex, KonProz etc. Sarvam AI leads the pack with $41 million in Series A followed by Ema and Neysa which raised $25 million and $20 million in their seed round respectively.
