Ex-OYO Exec Abhinav Sinha’s AI Start-Up Kluisz.ai Raises $9.6 Mn in Seed Round

Hospitality giant OYO’s former executive Abhinav Sinha has launched a Gen-AI-powered cloud infrastructure platform called ‘Kluisz.ai’. The venture has emerged from stealth mode and secured $9.6 million in seed funding round led by RTP Global, as per Mint reports.

The funding round saw participation from VCs, including Unicorn India Ventures, Blume Founders Fund, and Climber Capital. In addition, some angel investors like OYO’s Ritesh Agarwal, Innov8’s Ritesh Malik, and WeWork India’s Aditya Virwani also invested in the start-up.

The founder plans to use the fresh capital to accelerate product development, expand its engineering and marketing teams, and support deployments with early customers.

Notably, Kluisz's seed funding is the largest in the AI sector so far this year, the report said. It ranks as the seventh biggest equity seed round among 489 deals closed to date.

Also, Kluisz is the sole AI software startup among this year’s top 10 seed-funded companies, the Mint report added. Of the remaining nine, five are in deeptech, while the rest span sectors like investment tech, religion tech, fintech, and B2B e-commerce.

The top two seed rounds were raised by electric commercial vehicle maker EKA, which secured $23 million from Enam Holdings, and AI-focused data centre colocation provider RackBank, which raised $16.5 million from KRIIS.

Sinha, along with former AMD executive Vamshidhar Reddy and ex-Reliance, founded Kluisz.ai earlier this year. The start-up is building a cloud platform that will allow its clients to scale, deploy, and manage AI workloads.

The start-up claims that its open-source platform, currently available through “early access, helps enterprises automate and manage their cloud infrastructure in line with specific performance, cost, and compliance objectives.

Initially, it will focus on sectors like banking and financial services, manufacturing, and others with extensive edge use cases. It can be deployed across multiple environments like hybrid, on-prem, edge, and sovereign clouds.

Sinha had stepped down from the positions of global chief operating officer (COO) and chief product officer of OYO about six months ago.