Nvidia is in talks to lead a $20 million Series A round in Bengaluru-based AI infrastructure startup Simplismart at a $100 million pre-money valuation, according to economictimes.indiatimes.com. The chipmaker’s proposed investment, if closed, would value the two-year-old firm at five times the capital it has raised so far.
Discussions began with Nvidia’s Inception VC arm approaching Simplismart founders Amritanshu Jain and Devansh Goyal in late April, the report said. The round is expected to be a mix of primary capital and secondary share purchases from early angel investors, with term sheets exchanged last week. Existing backers including 3one4 Capital and a set of undisclosed SaaS founders are likely to participate pro-rata, economictimes.indiatimes.com added.
The deal would place Simplismart among the best-capitalised GPU orchestration startups in India, a segment where rival E2E Networks raised $12 million in January at a $75 million valuation, according to the same source. Nvidia’s cheque would also mark its second direct bet on an Indian generative-AI stack firm after it co-led Sarvam AI’s $41 million round in December. For Simplismart, whose platform auto-scales open-source LLMs on bare-metal GPUs, the capital is intended to triple its data-centre footprint from 1,000 to 3,000 H100-equivalent cards before year-end.
The round is slated to close by mid-June and would be followed immediately by the launch of a managed fine-tuning service for Llama-3 and Mistral models, the founders told economictimes.indiatimes.com. Watch for Nvidia’s GTC India roadshow in July, where Simplismart is expected to debut its first reference architecture jointly certified with the chipmaker.
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