Singulr AI Raises $10 Mn in Seed Funding Led by Nexus Venture Partners and Dell Technologies Capital

Singulr AI announced $10 million in seed financing led by Nexus Venture Partners and Dell Technologies Capital, with participation from leading industry executives. It launched today with the general availability of its enterprise AI governance and security platform, already deployed across companies in the technology, finance, and healthcare sectors.

The enterprise AI surge is real in live customer environments, Singulr consistently discovers 500+ unique AI services and models in use, with many of them redundant. Over three out of four employees use unapproved “Shadow AI” tools, often linked to personal accounts that expose enterprise IP. This dynamic threat will force organizations to balance rapid AI deployment against security risks and rising costs. Further, the rise of agentic AI increases complexity, making enterprise-grade governance essential for scaling AI operations.

Using the Singulr AI platform, CIO and IT operations teams can rationalize their AI service inventory and reduce unnecessary spend, while CISO and risk teams can streamline the onboarding of safe AI use cases while implementing granular policies to prevent data leakage and shadow AI.

Founders Shiv Agarwal and Abhijit Sharma, who previously built Arkin Net (acquired by VMware), reunited the team to build Singulr. In just one year, they have gone from a concept to a generally available solution that integrates seamlessly into enterprise environments without requiring infrastructure changes. Singulr is launching with SOC 2 and ISO 27001 compliance, ensuring enterprise-grade security and trust.

Shiv Agarwal, CEO and Co-founder of Singulr, said,

Companies are experiencing explosive growth in AI adoption across employees, partners, and vendors – but this surge comes with mounting security risks and costs.Through our extensive market research, we recognized that the broad use of generative AI technology is a complex problem needing an enterprise-grade solution to scale and secure. We started Singulr – to help enterprises rapidly adopt and operationalize powerful new AI technologies while managing costs and minimizing risk.

Jishnu Bhattacharjee, Managing Director at Nexus Venture Partners, added, “AI is transforming business with a new technology stack, evolving usage patterns, and unprecedented risks—forcing companies to rethink how they do security and governance.The Singulr team has a proven track record of solving complex, enterprise-scale problems and is launching a proven solution that enables businesses to efficiently and safely harness AI’s potential. I’m excited to partner with Shiv and the team again as they establish Singulr as the category leader.”

“This is the year the enterprise moves from experimenting with AI to leveraging its potential for pivotal business challenges. However, this adoption brings complex operational and security challenges requiring a systems approach—from developer experience to endpoint defense. The Singulr team has a proven track record of taking on enterprise challenges at Arkin and VMware and are well-equipped to do so again.” said Raman Khanna, Managing Director at Dell Technologies Capital.

Singulr helps customers get ahead and stay ahead of AI adoption with:

• Continuous discovery of all AI-in-use, including homegrown LLM applications and agents, public AI services, and embedded AI in SaaS applications, along with deep contextual insights into application settings, user activity, and sensitive data exposure in prompts or uploaded files.
• Rapid AI onboarding with automated risk scoring of AI services and models so that teams can quickly vet and approve new requests, unsanctioned use, or changes in models, dataset, or applications.
• Continuous AI-powered protection using context-aware policies and enforcement that allows organizations to permit, restrict, warn, redact, and trigger security tickets and workflows.

Companies interested in safe and cost-effective AI use can request a sample Instant AI Audit report or an AI Audit assessment here or at https://singulr.ai/sample-report

About Singulr AI

Singulr AI is an enterprise AI governance and security platform that helps streamline and secure enterprise AI use at scale. Security, IT, and AI teams can now accelerate AI-driven innovation while reducing business risks and unnecessary costs from data leakage, shadow AI, and AI sprawl.

Nexus backed Hasura Raises $9.9 Mn in Funding led by Vertex Ventures US

Hasura, the San Francisco and Bangalore-based company providing data access and data flow tools and services via GraphQL APIs announced today that it has raised $9.9 million in Series A funding led by Vertex Ventures US. The round also saw participation from SAP.iO Fund, the early-stage venture arm of SAP, existing investors Nexus Venture Partners and Strive VC. Several angels also participated, including James Tamplin (founder of Firebase), Sam Lambert (VP of Infrastructure Engineering at GitHub), Amod Malvia (co-founder of Udaan, ex CTO Flipkart), and Michael Stoppelman (ex-SVP of Engineering at Yelp).

GraphQL has emerged as an API solution to accelerate product and data delivery and is beloved by API consumers and application developers. Hasura automatically generates a real-time GraphQL API using declarative metadata configuration and authorization policies that gives consumers instant use. Hasura’s event engine makes it easy to integrate cloud-native/serverless business logic to the GraphQL API. This allows organizations and teams to use GraphQL in production and mission-critical applications (alongside existing and modern cloud-native infrastructure) without the significant cost of building and maintaining a GraphQL server.

Building GraphQL APIs in enterprise (where a majority of use-cases are platform-centric and data-centric) has been challenging. It creates complexity for engineers who struggle to keep databases from being swamped by malformed queries which can cause outages and delays, not to mention security/privacy concerns.

Hasura’s technology, powered by a highly concurrent just-in-time compiler, can process GraphQL queries and efficiently map them into queries to multiple underlying systems (like SQL databases, REST APIs etc). This approach allows Hasura to perform user-given transformations, apply security policies and implement caching requirements in an efficient and scalable way that is cloud-native. Front end engineers, often the consumers of a GraphQL API, truly feel the power of ‘serverless’ design with GraphQL+Hasura. Hasura’s enterprise product also adds GraphQL API management and governance features, including monitoring, traffic management and testing, and integrations for SSO and APM vendors.

Stoplight, an API Design Management Platform, moved their boilerplate GraphQL and authorization into Hasura from their own GraphQL server. “Hasura has significantly reduced the time our engineers spend writing boilerplate GraphQL code. However, what really drove adoption of Hasura at Stoplight is the powerful and flexible permissions system it provides out of the box, and how easy it is to incrementally introduce to an existing tech stack,” said Marc MacLeod, Founder & CEO at Stoplight.



“Hasura’s out-of-the-box support for real-time data via GraphQL subscriptions, granular access-control system and support for geospatial data has dramatically accelerated our efforts to modernize our data access layer for internal API consumers,” says Dr. Andreas Sindlinger, Solution Architect at Jeppesen (A Boeing Company).

Hasura’s open-source traction and developer adoption has grown steadily, crossing over 28M downloads and 15k GitHub stars. The Hasura GraphQL engine was one of last year’s fastest-growing projects as per the 2019 JavaScript Rising Stars report. Hasura has seen widespread adoption across some of the world’s most exciting organizations, from fast-growing startups to Fortune 500 enterprises, including some of the largest healthcare and financial services organizations.

“Hasura makes it possible for front-end teams to use GraphQL and move fast without breaking things on the back-end,” said Sandeep Bhadra, Partner at Vertex Ventures US. “We invested because of the incredible velocity of their product engineering, the tremendous community the founders built in such short order, and the pull from enterprises who want to empower their engineers to move with FAANG-like agility while supporting ops teams with performance management, security, and data access.”

With this funding, Hasura will invest heavily in engineering and product development, notably providing more ready-made integrations with databases and other data sources, in addition to hiring across sales and marketing.

“Hasura has an amazing fit with Postgres and the Postgres vendor ecosystem including new age distributed SQL Postgres vendors,” said Tanmai Gopal, CEO and co-founder at Hasura. “While we double down on the Postgres ecosystem, these funds will help us bring the Hasura and GraphQL experience to other databases to mobilize data in organizations by making high-performance and secure data access a reality.”

Hotel Aggregator Stayzilla Gets $13M in Series C From Existing Investors Matrix Partners & Nexus Ventures

Online aggregator of budget hotels and homestays, StayZilla has raised over $13 million in a Series C round of funding from existing investors Matrix Partners and Nexus Ventures, according to documents filed with the Registrar of Companies. The funding round was split into three tranches of $8.8 million (Rs.58.5 crore), $1.9 million (Rs.13 crore) and $2.4 million (Rs.16.3 crore), between November 2015 and March 2016.

The raised funding will be used by the company to improve product and technology and marketing initiatives for the alternate stay business. It previously raised $20 million from Nexus Venture Partners and Matrix Partners in February 2015.

Stayzilla is a platform (website and app) for verified homestays and alternate stays. It has more than 55,000 homestay and alternate stay options across 4000 towns in India. The platform caters to both home owners and travelers looking for differentiated, unique stay experiences. It offers special selective ‘community’ feature on the app that matches hosts and guests by their preferences and shared interests. The firm was founded by Yogendra Vasupal, Sachit Singhi and Rupal Yogendra.

StayZilla competes with budget hotel accommodation service provider Oyo Rooms and online travel agencies (OTAs) including MakeMyTrip, Goibibo and Yatra as well as home rental provider Airbnb. The Indian travel market is expected to become worth $40 billion by 2020, as per Nathan Blecharczyk, co-founder and chief technology officer of Airbnb.

Three days back, Stayzilla has hired Pankaj Gupta as Chief Product Officer and President of Technology. Pankaj was most recently at Twitter in San Francisco where he joined as an early employee and led the Personalization and Recommendations team. Pankaj will be shifting base from San Francisco to join Stayzilla at their Bengaluru office.

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