[YS Exclusive] Athina AI raises $3M in seed funding from Perplexity Co-founder Denis Yarats, Y Combinator, and others

Athina AI, a Y Combinator-backed startup, has raised $3 million in funding, bringing its total to $4.1 million. The investment round saw participation from Alex Ratner, CEO of Snorkel AI; Denis Yarats, CTO of Perplexity; Kleiner Perkins Scout Fund, and Y-Combinator, among other prominent global investors.

"This is a major milestone in our mission to enable teams to build production-ready AI applications and agents," said Shiv Sakhuja, Co-founder, Athina AI, in a LinkedIn post.

Prior to this, the Singapore-based firm secured a pre-seed round led by Flourish Ventures, GSF India, Dinesh Agarwal (India Mart), Murugavel Janakiraman (Matrimony.com), Bharat Founders Fund, and Mohit Gupta (former co-founder of Zomato).

The new funding will be used to accelerate product development, helping Athina AI advance its mission of enabling companies to build and deploy AI applications up to 10X faster.

Founded by Himanshu Bamoria and Shiv Sakhuja, the startup offers an end-to-end platform designed to streamline the development and deployment of production-ready AI solutions.

“We’re seeing fast-changing needs from companies, from AI agents to multi-modal applications. Our goal is to help these teams create reliable, production-ready systems,” Himanshu Bamoria, Co-founder of Athina AI, told YourStory. 

Athina enables users to create complex AI workflows, monitor their AI in production, and collaborate with their team to run experiments and tests.

AI engineering is a new field which requires heavy interactions with prompts and datasets, and the ability to handle complex inconsistent responses. They also need to be connected to other LLMs, data sources and external tools (or APIs) to make them more useful. 

“Athina’s platform enables teams to do this with a turnkey solution for AI engineering teams.Because LLMs are probabilistic models, they can return any kind of output, and they also frequently make mistakes. This means they require rigorous testing to make them ready for production-use,” said Sakhuja.

Athina AI has already established a strong client base, working with major companies, including unicorns like Perplexity, Meesho, Physicswallah, and Doximity. 

The startup is now focusing on expanding its presence in the US market, where it has seen the strongest traction. While its platform is accessible globally, most of its customers are based in the United States, with Indian clients primarily being larger enterprises.

"Athina has been on a phenomenal growth trajectory over the past few months. With thousands of new weekly sign-ups, they handle millions of logs on the platform along with running millions of evaluations every week," said Bamoria.