A new AI orchestration startup from the founders of the Lithuanian unicorn Nord Security is setting out to help enterprises put their AI projects into production, with an initial focus on bringing greater visibility, security and flexibility to large-scale language models (LLM).
Nexos.aias the startup is called, is the work of Tomas Okmanas (pictured above) and Eimantas Sabaliauskaswho built one of the most well-known brands not only in Lithuania, but throughout Europe. Nord Security, known for its flagship VPN product NordVPN, bootstrapped its first 10 years before surrendered a bumper $100 million investment in 2022 at a cost of $1.6 billion (it eventually hit a $3 billion worth in a subsequent fundraiser).
Their new company is emerging from stealth today with $8 million in funding from several high-profile backers, including top investors Index Ventureswhich has now made its first investment in Lithuania.
“We've known Tomas and the work he's done for years, so once we heard that he was building a new company in the AI space, and was finally willing to take venture capital money into it. [early] stage, we are very excited,” Index Ventures partner Hannah Seal told TechCrunch.
Other prominent investors include Creandum and Dig Ventures, and well-known angels such as the CEOs of Datadog, Klarna, Supercell, and Wix also participated.
Capitalizing on a catalyst
Currently, teams that want to put their AI into production have to connect a myriad of tools, which likely involves recruiting and building teams with the necessary skills. This is where Nexos.ai wants to come in.
“I saw that there was a big gap between running AI as pilots and going into production,” Okmanas told TechCrunch in an interview. “When you're testing AI in your lab, it might work and it might 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 the cost?”
Nord Security has been around for more than a decade, but five years ago, it folded into an umbrella company called Tesonetan incubator with a portfolio of more than two dozen businesses. Web-hosting firms are one of them Hostingerwhich was recently added AI-enabled smarts in its website building tool. Okmanas, a Hostinger board member and shareholder, said some of the issues they encountered served as a catalyst for what would become Nexos.ai.
“We wanted to use AI in our website builder, so we opened OpenAI, we started testing it, and we put it into production,” Okmanas said. “In August, we had $150,000 billed. For what? Why is it so expensive? No visibility.”
And while OpenAI has dropped several times, Okmanas is convinced that something needs to be done to make it easier to deploy, manage and optimize the “complex ecosystem of AI models” that organizations may need.
Through a simple API (application programming interface), customers can access over 200 AI models, from big name incumbents like OpenAI and Anthropic to smaller, niche LLMs. The idea is that, if OpenAI goes down, a company can temporarily (and automatically) switch to another provider without stopping. Or if the costs involved in accessing a particular LLM explode for whatever reason, a company may switch to another to keep their costs down.
Nexos.ai also ushers “intelligent caching” into the mix — if a particular question is repeated by multiple users, the system can turn to its own database instead of continuing to interact with LLM , which can be expensive.
In the area of security and compliance, Nexos.ai also prevents individuals from sending private data to LLM providers, or if an employee leaves a company, their access can be terminated immediately.
However, there is no escaping the elephant in the room: One of the reasons Businesses have been hesitant to embrace AI is the difficult issue of data security — healthcare companies, banks, or insurance companies cannot simply trust LLM providers with all their sensitive information. Hostinger itself is worth noting hit by a data breach in 2019 and NordVPN also hacked in the past — the kind of attacks that all companies face today.
This raises questions about how Nexos.ai handles such data, as it hosts everything on its own infrastructure. Okmanas said the company will likely offer self-hosting in the future, and it already supports integrations with the company's own internal LLMs.
It also has guardrails in place to detect when data, such as personally identifiable information (PII), is sent to it — in such cases, it can re-route the data back to the originating company's own LLM or database. But if a query is generic, like a customer asking an AI agent for details about their location and opening hours, the query will be handled on the Nexos.ai side.
From idea to start
Going from an idea to formal incorporation 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 is just the timing.
“I feel like we've gotten past the hype of AI, and now the real-world applications are coming,” Seal added. “All large enterprises are realizing that this is really significant, and they need to use AI at scale. And now is the time for infrastructure to catch up with the models.
However, the speed of implementation is due to the wider organizational setup at Tesonet, which has around 4,000 employees across its portfolio. This allowed Okmanas to quickly build a team of about 30 people he knew and trusted to work on Nexos.ai full-time.
“We have teams that can really join forces — they've been working together for so many years, they don't need to be told what to do,” Okmanas said. “We will also hire from outside, but that takes more time.”
The Nexos.ai platform is set to launch at the end of March, though Okmanas says it's already working with a group of “beta customers and design partners.”
