Nexos.ai has raised $30 million to help get enterprise artificial intelligence out of the lab and into regulated, production-grade deployments. The European startup describes itself as a neutral control layer between workers and AI systems, which it says enables productivity improvements without sacrificing data security or compliance.
The company, whose co-founders include Nord Security and ex-Freelancer.com veterans Tomas Okmanas and Eimantas Sabaliauskas, has heavy hitters in its corner beyond early customer attention. The latest round is co-led by Index Ventures and Evantic Capital, and includes investment from Creandum and Dig Ventures, as well as angel checks from the CEOs of Datadog, Klarna, Supercell, and Wix.
Nexos.ai’s pitch is simple: Enterprises hope to enjoy the fruits of generative AI, but can’t tolerate sensitive data spilling into public models or falling afoul of governance rules. By injecting a brokered layer between employees and large language models, it seeks to deliver security teams the visibility they crave while enabling business users to move quickly.
Why businesses require a safety layer for AI
Shadow AI has become a boardroom worry. Workers frequently paste sensitive information into public chatbots, an exposure not easily detected by traditional data loss prevention tools. IBM’s Global AI Adoption Index found that 35% of businesses had adopted AI in 2023 and another 42% were considering it, highlighting how fast illicit usage can grow faster than policy.
Meanwhile, the regulatory bar is higher.
The EU AI Act puts additional requirements on high-risk systems to manage data, log activity, and be transparent — further incentivizing the centralization of control. According to Gartner, a standard trust and security layer is almost inevitable as more organizations get on board with generative AI APIs or models, with its estimation of over 80% of large enterprises using such technology by 2026. Generative AI may help unlock $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion in annual economic value, according to estimates by McKinsey — but only if companies can successfully and widely implement it without harm.
Inside the Nexos.ai platform for secure, compliant AI use
Nexos.ai’s initial release consists of two principal elements: an AI Workspace for employees and an AI Gateway for developers and platform teams. The Gateway is the single point of entry for approximately 200 AI models, eliminating fragmentation while enabling organizations to standardize authentication, usage policies, and routing across providers.
From a functional perspective, the Gateway is designed to be a control plane.
Security and compliance teams may be able to set rules around handling data, monitor how it’s being used, and track costs from a single location. The company claims that it is speeding up support for private models so that sensitive workloads can remain within a firm’s cloud or on-premises perimeter — which Zendesk says is of interest to customers with data residency requirements, and those clients who have stricter governance requirements.
Experienced backers and a deep operator network supporting growth
Beyond capital, Nexos.ai is tapping operator expertise. Evantic Capital, which was founded by former Sequoia partner Matt Miller, also provides a network of 140 senior operators who give advice to portfolio companies. But when you’re a startup trying to build an enterprise-grade control layer, a bit of hands-on product and go-to-market feedback can be just as valuable as the check.
The track record of the founders is important, too. The two had previously bootstrapped Nord Security, the cybersecurity group that houses NordVPN, to a multibillion-dollar valuation, and they have built and invested through Tesonet. That history gives Nexos.ai both credibility with CISOs and access to design partners who can help guide the roadmap.
Early traction and go-to-market focus in regulated industries
The team claims they are running 50-60 demo calls per week, and that their initial focus is tech-forward enterprises and regulated industries where governance and auditability are non-negotiable. Data sovereignty is a hot topic in Europe, as public institutions globally move to explore controlled paths of adoption that shield sensitive data at home.
Early users include companies from the Tesonet portfolio and Bulgarian fintech unicorn Payhawk. To provide a proof point that AI can drive operating leverage, the co-founders point to what happened at Hostinger, where an internal AI assistant led to about 500 fewer hires and roughly €10 million in savings over one year. Nexos.ai hopes to expand across Europe and North America, and anticipates growing its headcount to around 100, with most employees located in Europe.
What this funding means for enterprise AI adoption at scale
The next chapter in enterprise AI is less about impressive demos and more about safe, standardized delivery. A gateway model — similar to the API gateways that professionalized the early cloud era — provides common ground for CFOs, CIOs, and CISOs: measurable productivity, clear guardrails, and predictable spend.
Nexos.ai joins a crowded but growing field. Cloud providers have packaged guardrails into services such as Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, and Google Vertex AI, while specialized startups develop AI security, policy frameworks, and model observability. The differentiator will be depth of governance, breadth of model support, cost containment and the ability for enterprises to wire AI in a safe manner into daily workflows.
Armed with new funding, operator backing, and founders who are babies in the cybersecurity world, Nexos.ai is poised to be the sort of honest broker that enterprises have been needing. The proof of the pudding will be simple: understand to what extent it can provide organizations auditable trust and hard ROI without impeding their teams. If so, a lot more boardrooms will be prepared to greenlight AI at scale.
