Another AI startup received funding this quarter — Athina AI closed a $3 million seed round on Thursday. Y Combinator, Flourish Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Scout Fund, GSF, Bharat Founders Fund backed the financing along with investors from Perplexity, Snorkel AI and more.
Athina is a collaborative AI development platform designed to build, test and monitor AI features and deliver AI to production “10 times” faster. Some of the AI startup’s top customers include unicorns like Perplexity, Meesho, Doximity, PhysicsWallah, and more.
Founded in 2022 and part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2023 collective, Athina offers production-ready AI support for enterprises to build seamless AI applications.
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“AI will be used in every software product in the next 5 years—but building production-ready AI is very hard,” co-founder and CEO Shiv Sakhuja wrote in a LinkedIn post announcing the seed round.
Sakhuja, who holds a computer science degree from Columbia University, formerly worked as an engineer at Google.
Sakhuja’s fellow Indian American co-founder Himanshu Bamoria also joined the excitement of the fundraise and wrote the following in his post about Athina: “AI engineering requires extensive experimentation with prompts, models, datasets, and handling complex, unpredictable responses.
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“Athina’s end-to-end AI development platform is designed to help teams overcome these challenges and succeed,” Bamoria added.
Bamoria, who graduated from IIT Delhi, began his entrepreneurial journey even before Athina and helped found startups Gingr, Olan Fuels, and Atcost, backed by Delhi accelerator GSF.
With the goal of streamlining and supporting AI engineering teams, Athina was brought to life to build safe and reliable AI products.
“The future of software is AI… and we’re just getting started,” Sakhuja noted.
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