A new AI orchestration startup from the founders of the Lithuanian unicorn Nord Security aims to help enterprises bring their AI projects into production, with an initial focus on providing greater visibility, security and adaptability to large language models (LLM).
Nexos.aias the startup is called, it is his work Thomas Okmanas (image above) and Eimantas Sampaliauskaswho built one of the most recognizable brands not only in Lithuania, but throughout Europe. Nord Security, best known for its flagship VPN product NordVPN, had a 10-year run before bowing to a $100 million investment in 2022 at a $1.6 billion valuation (later to $3 billion valuation during a subsequent fundraiser).
Their new company comes out of stealth today with $8 million in funding from a slew of high-profile backers, including lead investor Index Ventures, which has now made its first investment in Lithuania.
“We’ve known Thomas and the work he’s done for many years, so we just found out that he was building a new company in the artificial intelligence space and he was finally willing to take venture capital money into it [early] stage, we were very keen,” Index Ventures partner Hannah Seale he told TechCrunch.
Other notable investors include Creandum and Dig Ventures, while prominent angels such as the CEOs of Datadog, Klarna, Supercell and Wix also participated.
Catalyst Capitalization
Currently, teams looking to put their AI into production must connect a myriad of tools, which likely includes recruiting and building teams with the necessary skills. This is where Nexos.ai wants to step in.
“I’ve seen that there’s a big gap between running AI as pilots and going into production,” Okmanas told TechCrunch in an interview. “When you test AI in your lab, it can work and it can be useful, but when you want to put it into production, especially in enterprises, 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 folded into an umbrella company called Tesonetincubator with a portfolio more than two dozen businesses. One of them is the web hosting company Hostingerwhich was recently added AI-enabled Smarts in its website builder. Okmanas, a Hostinger board member and shareholder, said some of the issues they faced served as a catalyst for what would eventually become Nexos.ai.
“We wanted to use artificial intelligence in our website builder, so we turned on OpenAI, started testing it, and put it into production,” Okmanas said. “In August we charged $150,000. For what? Why was it so expensive? There was no visibility.”
And while OpenAI fell a few times, Okmanas was convinced that something had to be done to make it easier to develop, manage and optimize the “increasingly complex ecosystem of AI models” that organizations might need.
Through a simple API (application programming interface), customers can access more than 200 AI models, from well-known incumbents like OpenAI and Anthropic to smaller, niche LLMs. The idea is, if OpenAI crashes, a company can temporarily (and automatically) switch to a different provider without breaking stride. Or if the costs involved in accessing a particular LLM skyrocket for any reason, a company may switch to another to keep its costs down.
Nexos.ai also introduces “smart caching” into the mix — if a particular query is repeated by multiple users, the system can turn to its own database instead of continuing to deal with LLM, which can be expensive.
On the security and compliance front, Nexos.ai also prevents individuals from sending personal data to LLM providers, or if an employee leaves a company, their access can be terminated immediately.
But there’s no escaping the elephant in the room: One of the reasons businesses are hesitant to adopt AI is the thorny issue of data security — healthcare companies, banks or insurance companies can’t just trust LLM providers with all their sensitive information. It’s worth noting that Hostinger itself was hit with a data breach in 2019, and NordVPN has also been hacked in the past – the kind of attacks that all companies face today.
This raises questions about how Nexos.ai handles such data, given that it hosts everything on its own infrastructure. Okmanas said the company will likely offer self-hosting in the future and already supports integrations with the companies’ own in-house LLMs.
It also has guardrails to detect when data, such as personally identifiable information (PII), is being sent to it — in such cases, it can reroute the data back to LLM or the company’s own database. But if a query is general, such as a customer asking an AI agent for details about its location and hours of operation, then the query will be handled on the Nexos.ai side.
From the idea to the beginning
Going from an idea to formal integration 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 of it was simply timing.
“I feel like we’ve finally gotten past the AI hype and now the real-world applications are coming,” Seal added. “All large enterprises are realizing that this is really important and need to adopt AI at scale. And now is the time for the infrastructure to catch up with the models.”
The speed of execution, however, was largely due to the wider organizational structure of Tesonet, which has approximately 4,000 employees across 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, we don’t have to tell them what’s what,” Okmanas said. “We will also hire from abroad, but that takes a lot more time.”
Nexos.ai’s platform isn’t set to launch until the end of March, though Okmanas said it’s already working with a bunch of “beta customers and design partners.”
