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

For most large companies, AI is either a promise that has yet to be fulfilled or a safety risk. The efforts of Lithuania’s most famous entrepreneurial duo to solve this riddle have attracted attention and funding.

Only months later Nexos.ai emerged from stealth with an $8 million funding round led by Index Ventures, Nord Security co-founders Tomas Okmanas and Eimantas Sabaliauskas have closed a €30 million (approximately $35 million) Series A for this new startup – a platform that helps companies safely adopt AI tools by acting as an intermediary between employees and AI systems.

According to Okmanas, “the largest corporate data breach” is currently in the making as employees upload sensitive information to LLMs. Instead of banning the use of AI, he wants Nexos.ai to act as “Switzerland for LLMs” and act as a neutral intermediary. By sitting between teams and AI tools, the platform aims to keep data under control without sacrificing the productivity gains that companies want but aren’t pursuing.

That combination of seasoned founders tackling a critical business problem explains why this new round was launched so quickly — with Index and Evantic Capital jointly leading the way at a €300 million (about $350 million) valuation, according to a company spokesperson. Previous backers Creandum and Dig Ventures also participated, along with angel backers including the CEOs of Datadog, Klarna, Supercell and Wix.

Evantic, the new venture capital firm launched by former Sequoia Capital partner Matt Miller, was persistent enough to make the round happen, even though Nexos.ai was not a fundraiser, Okmanas said. He and Sabaliauskas famously started their previous companies, including Nord, the Cybersecurity company valued at $3 billion behind NordVPN. But they now see the added value of venture capital investments.

In addition to Index’s support, Nexos.ai now benefits from Miller’s guidance and his own Network ‘Legends’ —140 operators who advise Evantic’s startups in exchange for a share of the fund’s profits. Okmanas said he is a legend himself and leverages the expertise of others to shape the product – and that’s where the new capital will go.

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

Okmanas said his team is currently doing 50 to 60 demo calls a week, but expects traditional companies will have to do “a lot of homework” to convince their boards of how they want to adopt AI. Nexos.ai could help them by making deployment easier. But first, the startup is targeting tech-savvy companies that already use AI every day, as well as those operating in regulated industries that are concerned about governance and sending sensitive data to AI models hosted abroad.

Okmanas and Sabaliauskas identified the gap in AI management while overseeing the portfolio of Tesonet, their company that builds and invests in startups. Tesonet portfolio companies are also among the customers who do so Nexos.ai announces, alongside Bulgarian fintech unicorn Payhawk, which also has an office in Vilnius. According to a press release, the financing will now support expansion in Europe and North America.

For Okmanas, the mission is to remove barriers to broader adoption of AI. As boards debate whether AI can deliver real value, he points to results within Tesonet’s own portfolio: at Hostingera web hosting provider, an AI assistant reduced the need for human support. Okmanas says: “That’s why we didn’t have to hire 500 people and save €10 million this year alone.”

Despite talking figures at Hostinger, Okmanas refused to reveal how much revenue Nexos.ai itself generates. Instead, he said that by the time the company celebrates its first anniversary, the team will have grown to 100 people — especially in Europe, where data sovereignty concerns are also starting to open doors for Nexos.ai at public institutions, potentially opening a new market beyond its enterprise focus.

The headline of this story has been corrected for accuracy.