European AI rising star Nexos.ai raises $30M to unlock enterprise AI adoption

For most enterprise companies, AI is either a promise that has yet to be fulfilled or a security risk. An effort by Lithuania’s most famous entrepreneurial pair to solve that puzzle has attracted attention — and funding.

Just months after Nexos.ai came out of the closet with an $8 million funding round led by Index Ventures, Nord Security co-founders Tomas Okmanas and Eimantas Sabaliuskas have closed a €30 million Series A (about $35 million) for this new startup — a platform that intermediaries between employees and AI systems. Helps companies safely adopt AI tools by acting as.

In Oakmans’s view, “the largest corporate data leak ever” is currently underway, as employees upload sensitive information to LLM. Rather than banning the use of AI, he wants Nexos.ai to act as “Switzerland for LLMs”, acting as a neutral arbiter. Sitting between Teams and AI tools, the platform aims to put data under control without sacrificing the productivity gains that companies want but are afraid to pursue.

The combination of experienced founders tackling a significant enterprise problem explains why this new round was raised so quickly – Index and Ivantic Capital are co-leading the €300 million valuation (about $350 million), according to a company spokesperson. Angel backers including the CEOs of Datadog, Klarna, Supercell, and Wix, as well as previous backers Creandum and Digg Ventures, also participated.

The new venture firm, Ivantic, launched by former Sequoia Capital partner Matt Miller, was determined enough to make the round successful even after Nexos.ai raised money, Oakmans said. He and Sabaliauskas famously bootstrapped their previous businesses, including Nord, the $3 billion cybersecurity company behind NordVPN. But now they see value addition from VCs.

In addition to the index’s support, Nexos.ai is now benefiting from Miller’s guidance and his ‘Legends’ network—140 operators who advise Ivantic’s portfolio startups in exchange for a portion of the fund’s profits. Oakmans said he is a legend himself and is using the expertise of others to shape the product – that’s where the new capital will go.

Currently, Nexos’ AI product includes an AI Workspace interface for employees and an AI Gateway for developers. The gateway serves as a control layer for security, cost management, and compliance oversight while reducing fragmentation, which Oakmans sees as a significant barrier to AI adoption. The gateway provides a single access point for approximately 200 AI models, and the company plans to use its funding to accelerate its support of private models for sensitive data.

Oakmans said his team is currently making 50 to 60 demo calls a week, but estimates traditional businesses will have to do “a lot of homework” to convince their boards how they want to adopt AI. Nexos.ai can help them by simplifying deployment. But first, the startup is focusing on tech-savvy companies that already use AI daily, as well as companies working in regulated industries that have concerns about governance and sending sensitive data to AI models hosted in foreign countries.

Okmanas and Sabaliauskas identified the AI ​​governance gap while overseeing a portfolio for Tesonate, their company that builds and invests in startups. The clients Nexos.ai is disclosing include Tesonate portfolio companies along with Bulgarian fintech unicorn Payhawk, which also has an office in Vilnius. According to a press release, the funding will now support expansion across Europe and North America.

For Oakmans, the mission is removing barriers to widespread AI adoption. While boards debate whether AI can provide real value, he points to results from Tesonate’s own portfolio: At Hostinger, a web hosting provider, an AI assistant reduced the need for human support. “That’s why we didn’t need to hire 500 people and saved €10 million this year alone,” says Oakmans.

Despite talking up the numbers on Hostinger, Oakmans declined to disclose how much revenue Nexos.ai itself is generating. Instead, he said the team will have 100 people by the time the company celebrates its first anniversary — mostly in Europe, where data sovereignty concerns have begun to open doors for Nexos.ai in public institutions, potentially opening a new market beyond its enterprise focus.