Nvidia has backed Bengaluru-based startup Simplismart in a $14 million all-primary Series B round, betting on software that helps companies run AI models more efficiently and, in some cases, with fewer GPUs. The round was led by Dallas Venture Capital, with Accel, Shastra VC, and Micromax also participating. The deal values the four-year-old startup at about $100 million including the new funding.

Simplismart addresses a central pain point of the AI boom: companies are spending heavily on GPUs, but running models reliably and economically at scale is hard. Different workloads require different trade-offs between speed, cost, and performance, and deployment often demands complex manual tuning. Simplismart‘s software sits between AI models and the underlying computing infrastructure, automatically adjusting how models are deployed and managed to meet each customer’s requirements. It says it can optimize response speed, request throughput, and compute consumption, letting companies get more out of their existing GPU stack. Customers can run models through Simplismart‘s own platform or within their existing cloud and on-premises infrastructure, and the startup offers fine-tuning, auto-scaling, and performance monitoring tools. It also enables cloud providers to build and operate their own AI inference services on GPU infrastructure using its software.

Simplismart reports real customer results: AI video-generation platform InVideo cut its GPU serving costs by 56%, and the startup works with video companies HeyGen and Higgsfield as well as enterprise AI startup Ema. Indian cloud provider Yotta uses Simplismart‘s technology to power the serverless AI inference service in its Shakti Studio platform. Jain said Simplismart‘s annualized revenue run rate has grown 14-fold over the past six months to an eight-figure sum, though the figure is based on recent customer usage rather than contracted recurring revenue and excludes revenue passed through to infrastructure providers. More than half of the startup’s revenue comes from the U.S., despite having more customers in India.

Alongside the investment, Nvidia has been working with Simplismart on technical integrations, including around Nvidia‘s Dynamo inference software. The collaboration involves Simplismart engineers and Nvidia solutions architects, and Nvidia has helped introduce the startup to potential customers and partners. The investment looks like a paradox: Nvidia, the dominant AI chip supplier, is backing software that can let companies run some workloads with fewer GPUs. Jain argued the opposite: making AI inference more efficient can make Nvidia‘s hardware more attractive and encourage wider AI adoption, ultimately benefiting Nvidia.

Simplismart operates in a crowded inference-software market, competing with Nvidia itself as well as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, plus a wave of startups building tools to make AI models faster and cheaper. Jain said Simplismart tends to win where customers face stringent service-level agreements and tight total-cost-of-ownership constraints. Unlike rivals that offer preset faster-or-cheaper options, Simplismart aims for a balance tailored to each customer’s needs.

The startup was founded in 2022 by former Oracle engineer Amritanshu Jain and former Google engineer Devansh Ghatak, who met at BITS Pilani. It now employs 58 people. Simplismart plans to use the new funding to expand in the U.S., grow its team, and invest further in its inference software. Asked about an Economic Times report that the startup was seeking a much larger round at a $300 million to $400 million valuation, Jain declined to comment, said the startup was not actively fundraising, and noted the Series B was closed and would not be extended.