Deccan AI Raises $25 Million in Round Led by A91 Partners
Startup taps investor backing as demand grows for post-training data, evaluation and model-tuning work handled outside AI labs
Topics
News
- Deccan AI Raises $25 Million in Round Led by A91 Partners
- Adani in Talks With Meta, Google, Flipkart on Data Centers: Report
- India Ties $70 Billion Data Center Push to Local Build-out, Jobs
- Novo Moves Delhi High Court Against Dr Reddy’s Over Olymviq Brand
- Google Pushes Deeper into AI Music with Lyria 3
- OpenAI Foundation to Deploy $1 Billion on AI Risks, Health and Jobs
Image Credit- Diksha Mishra/ MIT Sloan Management Review India
Deccan AI, a startup focused on post-training data and model evaluation, has raised $25 million in an all equity funding round led by A91 Partners, with participation from Susquehanna International Group and Prosus Ventures.
Founded in October 2024, the company provides services that help artificial intelligence models improve after initial training.
This includes generating data, running evaluations and supporting reinforcement learning, as developers work to make systems more reliable in real-world use.
While companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic continue to build core models in-house, a growing share of post-training work is being outsourced to specialist providers, reflecting rising demand for high-quality data and model refinement.
Deccan AI works with clients including Google DeepMind and Snowflake, offering services such as expert feedback, evaluation tools and systems that help AI models interact with external software through application programming interfaces (APIs).
It also develops its own products, including an evaluation suite called Helix and an automation platform for enterprise use.
The company is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area and has a large operations team in Hyderabad. It employs around 125 people and relies on a network of more than 1 million contributors, most of them based in India.
Founder Rukesh Reddy told TechCrunch that focusing operations in one country has helped the company manage quality.
“Many of our competitors go to 100-plus countries to find experts. If you have operations in just one country, it becomes far easier to maintain quality,” he said.
