Nexos.ai: Nord Security Founders Launch AI Orchestration Platform with $8M Funding

The brains behind our favorite VPN want to be your gateway to more than 200 AI models

$8 million raised to help enterprises handle the mounting amount of LLMs, with more than 200 now supported As artificial intelligence tools rapidly evolve, businesses face growing challenges in managing AI models, balancing costs, and ensuring reliable performance. Nexos.ai, a new unified AI orchestration platform from the founders of business VPN vendor Nord is designed to help enterprises deploy AI at scale by addressing these challenges; providing access to over 200 AI models to simplify their integration into enterprise The company has secured $8 million in funding from investors, including Olivier Pomel, CEO of Datadog; Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Klarna; Ilkka Paananen, CEO of Supercell; and Avishai Abrahami, CEO of Wix.com. Tomas Okmanas and Eimantas Sabaliauskas, co-founders of Nord Security and now Nexos.ai, faced challenges in integrating AI across various companies even after spending over $100,000 on large language models (LLMs) in some cases. Feedback from businesses also revealed a lack in infrastructure capable of supporting scalable, high-quality, and cost-effective AI applications. Nexos.ai also includes models from providers such as OpenAI, Google, and Meta, to assist enterprises in managing their AI operations. "Companies know that AI is an operational and competitive necessity, but they're drowning in the challenges of managing multiple models, controlling costs and ensuring accurate and reliable performance," Okmanas said. "At the same time, AI models are becoming increasingly autonomous and capable of handling complex tasks with minimal human intervention. We've built nexos.ai to be the enterprise-grade platform that makes working with AI as intuitive as working with human teams - providing the infrastructure and oversight to make sure these models perform at their best while remaining cost-effective and secure." Scheduled for release in early 2025, the platform is already being tested by international companies to cater for automated customer support.

Nexos.ai reels in $8M to simplify enterprise AI projects - SiliconANGLE

Nexos.ai, a new startup that helps enterprises run large language models in production, launched today with $8 million from investors. Index Ventures led the funding round. It was joined by Creandum, Dig Ventures and the Chief Executive Officers of several major tech firms. The list includes Datadog Inc., Wix.com Ltd., financial technology company Klarna Bank AB and Supercell Oy, a major video game developer. Lithuania-based Nexos.ai was launched last year by Tomas Okmanas and Eimantas Sabaliauskas, the founders of cybersecurity provider Nord Security. The latter company develops a virtual private networking tool called NordVPN with more than 10 million users. It received a $3 billion valuation in its most recent funding round. Nexos.ai is developing a platform that will make it easier for enterprises to build LLM-powered applications. The company says that its software can restore workloads after an AI model outage, speed up troubleshooting and ease other maintenance tasks. Nexos.ai's platform is built around an application programming interface that provides access to more than 200 LLMs. The catalog includes both proprietary models and open-source algorithms such as Meta Platform Inc.'s Llama series. Because all the LLMs ingest prompts through the same API, developers can switch an application to a new model with less coding than would otherwise be required. Nexos.ai is also capable of switching between LLMs automatically. If the model that an application relies on to process user queries goes offline, the platform reroutes prompts to another model. It can lower inference costs by sending simple requests to a smaller, less hardware-intensive LLM. Nexos.ai promises to further cut hardware expenses with a feature called semantic cache. It can store an LLM's response to a query in a database and retrieve it the next time a user asks the same question. This removes the need for the AI model to generate the response from scratch, which avoids the associated costs. The platform logs every prompt and LLM response in a searchable repository for troubleshooting purposes. Using the feature, developers can check how a model's responses change over time to identify quality issues. Alongside individual prompts and the corresponding LLM responses, Nexos.ai also logs more than a dozen high-level metrics such as token usage. The company will provide guardrails for AI applications powered by its platform. According to Nexos.ai, those guardrails ensure that prompts containing sensitive business data are sent to an enterprise's internally-hosted LLMs rather than a third-party model. The platform also prevents models from generating harmful output.

Nord Security founders launch Nexos.ai to help enterprises take AI projects from pilot to production | TechCrunch

A new AI orchestration startup from the founders of 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 adaptability to large language models (LLMs). Nexos.ai, as the startup is called, is the handiwork of Tomas Okmanas (pictured above) and Eimantas Sabaliauskas, who built one of the most recognizable brands not only in Lithuania, but in all of Europe. Nord Security, best known for its flagship VPN product NordVPN, bootstrapped its way through its first 10 years before succumbing to a bumper $100 million investment in 2022 at a $1.6 billion valuation. Their new company is exiting 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 ever investment into Lithuania. "We've known of Tomas and the work that he's done for many years, so as soon as we heard that he was building a new company in the AI space, and was finally willing to take venture capital money at this [early] stage, we were very eager," Index Ventures' partner Hannah Seal told TechCrunch. Other notable investors include Creandum and Dig Ventures, and prominent angels such as the CEOs of Datadog, Klarna, Supercell, and Wix also participated. Currently, teams that want to put their AI into production have to connect myriad tools, which likely involves 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're testing AI in your lab, it might 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 cost?" Nord Security's been around for more than a decade, but five years ago, it was folded into an umbrella company called Tesonet, an incubator with a portfolio of more than two-dozen businesses. One of these is web-hosting firm Hostinger, which recently added AI-enabled smarts to 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 eventually become Nexos.ai. "We wanted to employ AI in our website builder, so we turned on OpenAI, we started testing it, and we put it in production," Okmanas said. "In August, we had $150,000 billed. For what? Why was it so expensive? There was no visibility." And when OpenAI went down a handful of times, Okmanas was convinced that something had to be done to make it easier to deploy, manage and optimize the "increasingly complex ecosystem of AI models" that organizations may need. Through a simple API (application programming interface), customers can access more than 200 AI models, from big-name incumbents like OpenAI and Anthropic to smaller, niche LLMs. The idea is, if OpenAI goes down, a company can temporarily (and automatically) switch to a different provider without breaking stride. Or if the costs involved in accessing a specific LLM explode for whatever reason, a company can transition to another one 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 rather than continuing to engage the LLM, which can get expensive. On the security and compliance fronts, 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. There's no escaping the elephant in the room, though: One of the reasons enterprises have been hesitant to embrace AI is the thorny issue of data security -- healthcare companies, banks, or insurance firms can't simply 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 sort of attacks that all companies face today. This raises questions around how Nexos.ai handles such data, given that it is hosting everything on its own infrastructure. Okmanas said the company will likely offer self-hosting in the future, and that it already supports integrations with companies' 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 LLMs or database. But if a query is generic, like a customer asking an AI agent for details about their location and opening hours, then the query will be handled on the Nexos.ai side. Going from an idea to formal incorporation took Nexos.ai around six weeks, and while the speed of securing the funding was largely down to the founders' pedigree, a big part of it was simply the timing. "I feel like we've finally gone beyond the hype of AI, and now the real-world applications are coming," Seal added. "All the large enterprises are realizing this is really meaningful, and they need to adopt AI at scale. And now is the time for the infrastructure to catch up with the models." The speed of execution, though, was substantively due to the broader organizational setup at Tesonet, which has around 4,000 employees across its portfolio. This enabled Okmanas to quickly assemble a team of around 30 people who 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, there's no need to tell them what's what," Okmanas said. "We'll also be hiring from the outside, but that takes much more time." Nexos.ai's platform is set to launch by the end of March, though Okmanas said it is already working with a bunch of "beta customers and design partners."

nexos.ai launches an enterprise AI orchestration platform with funding led by Index Ventures

VILNIUS, Lithuania, January 17, 2025 - nexos.ai, a pioneering AI infrastructure company, today emerges from stealth with an announcement of $8 million funding led by Index Ventures, with participation from Creandum and Dig Ventures. nexos.ai is solving one of the most pressing challenges businesses face in 2025: how to efficiently deploy, manage, and optimize an increasingly complex ecosystem of AI models across their organizations. nexos.ai was co-founded in late 2024 by Tomas Okmanas and Eimantas Sabaliauskas, the co-founders of several successful businesses including Nord Security (valued at $3 billion). The round attracted investment from prominent angels including Olivier Pomel (CEO of Datadog), Sebastian Siemiatkowski (CEO of Klarna), through Flat Capital, Ilkka Paananen (CEO of Supercell) and Avishai Abrahami (CEO of Wix.com). As companies race to integrate AI capabilities, they face mounting complexity in managing multiple AI models, controlling costs, and ensuring reliable performance. The idea for nexos.ai emerged from Okmanas' firsthand experience, where he struggled to integrate AI across several companies he was involved with - despite spending over $100k per month on large language models (LLM) usage in some cases. Conversations with other companies revealed the same pattern: businesses were eager to deploy AI, but lacked the infrastructure to create high-quality, secure, flexible and cost-effective applications at scale. nexos.ai has solved this problem by building an AI operating system for enterprises, enabling them to harness and deploy hundreds of AI models through a single, seamless platform. "Companies know that AI is an operational and competitive necessity, but they're drowning in the challenges of managing multiple models, controlling costs and ensuring accurate and reliable performance," said Okmanas, CEO and co-founder of nexos.ai. "At the same time, AI models are becoming increasingly autonomous and capable of handling complex tasks with minimal human intervention. We've built nexos.ai to be the enterprise-grade platform that makes working with AI as intuitive as working with human teams - providing the infrastructure and oversight to make sure these models perform at their best while remaining cost-effective and secure." The nexos.ai platform will launch in Q1 2025, and is already being tested by several major international companies for use cases such as automated customer support. It provides access to over 200 AI models from leading providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. Key capabilities include: Smart model routing and load balancing to optimize performance and costsIntelligent caching that can significantly reduce costs for repeated queriesComprehensive monitoring and analytics for AI operationsEnterprise-grade security and compliance controlsAutomated performance optimization across model providers "nexos.ai is a critical solution for any enterprise deploying AI at scale, where managing the inherently complex ecosystem of large language models, AI agents, and applications with varying levels of autonomy becomes essential. The demand for such solutions is expected to grow exponentially in the coming months and years," said Hannah Seal, Partner at Index Ventures. "Tomas and his team have consistently demonstrated their ability to tackle complex challenges by creating products that deliver elegant, simple solutions -- and this one might be their most consequential yet." For more information and to join the waitlist, visit nexos.ai. About Tomas Okmanas Tomas Okmanas is a tech-driven entrepreneur, investor, and co-founder of multiple global startups across both B2C and B2B sectors. He is best known for co-founding Nord Security, a leading global cybersecurity company that provides the world's most advanced VPN service, NordVPN. Tomas consistently demonstrates strong business acumen, whether by bootstrapping ventures like Oxylabs, a market-leading web intelligence collection platform, or by fostering growth from the earliest stages, as seen with hosting provider Hostinger, now globally recognized as the fastest-growing brand in its market. One of his most recent ventures is nexos.ai, a rapidly growing AI startup aiming to become the ultimate AI orchestration platform for the agentic era. Tomas' key strengths lies in his ability to leverage technology to scale businesses and brands across diverse industries, from health-tech to sports. He owns the rising basketball brand, the BC London Lions, and is a part-owner of the Euroleague championship-winning and history-rich BC Žalgiris. Additionally, he co-founded the tech accelerator Tesonet and holds the majority share of media company Mediatech. Under his leadership, the combined talent pool across his ventures now exceeds 3,000 people. About Index Ventures Index Ventures is a global venture capital firm that backs exceptional entrepreneurs. We help founders turn their bold ideas into global businesses and, through the companies they build, have a long-lasting and positive impact on the world around us. Index-backed businesses are supported by an experienced team of investors, strategists, and an extensive global network built over three decades of startup investing. Working side-by-side through the scale-up journey, we forge deep and long-lasting relationships with founders and their teams across many industries and geographies. About Creandum Founded in 2003, Creandum is a leading pan-European early-stage venture capital firm. The firm's portfolio of 150+ companies includes some of Europe's most successful tech companies across a wide range of industries, including Spotify, Klarna, Depop, Trade Republic, Pleo, and neo4j. Today, every sixth company is a billion dollar company or more. Creandum's advisory teams are based in Stockholm, London, Berlin, and San Francisco and offer extensive operational expertise to support the funds' portfolio companies from seed to exit to become global category leaders. Learn more at www.creandum.com. About nexos.ai nexos.ai is a cutting-edge AI infrastructure company providing a centralized platform for enterprises to seamlessly integrate and manage multiple AI models. Founded in 2024 by Tomas Okmanas and Eimantas Sabaliauskas, who also co-founded several bootstrapped global ventures including the $3B cybersecurity unicorn Nord Security and Oxylabs, nexos.ai addresses the urgent enterprise need to efficiently deploy, manage, and optimize AI models within organizations. Originating in the ecosystem of Lithuania-based tech accelerator Tesonet, the company attracted its first investment of $8M in early 2025 from Index Ventures, Creandum, Dig Ventures, and a number of prominent angel investors. Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs