Deccan AI raises $25M to scale

Deccan AI has raised a $25 million Series A to build tools that make artificial intelligence systems behave more reliably in production. (deccan.ai) The round was led by A91 Partners, with participation from Susquehanna International Group and existing investor Prosus Ventures. Deccan announced the financing on April 14, 2026. (deccan.ai) (economictimes.indiatimes.com) Deccan sells into a part of the AI stack that comes after a model is trained: generating expert data, testing outputs, and building reinforcement-learning environments so models can recover from mistakes in longer tasks. (techcrunch.com) (deccan.ai) Founder Rukesh Reddy told The Economic Times that companies are moving “past the chatbot phase,” where a polished demo is easier than a dependable system handling business logic. He said Deccan is targeting that gap for enterprises and frontier model labs. (economictimes.indiatimes.com) The company’s enterprise products include Helix, a hybrid human-and-automated evaluation suite, and EnterpriseOS, a platform for automating back-office and middle-office workflows with AI agents. (economictimes.indiatimes.com) (deccan.ai) TechCrunch reported that Deccan was founded in October 2024, is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, runs a large operations team in Hyderabad, and employs about 125 people. (techcrunch.com) Reddy told TechCrunch the startup has about 10 customers, runs a couple dozen active projects at a time, and draws on a network of more than 1 million contributors. Around 5,000 to 10,000 contributors are active in a typical month. (techcrunch.com) Deccan says its customers include Google DeepMind and Snowflake, and that it plans to use the new money for deep-tech hiring and enterprise platforms. The company is also setting up a Bengaluru office to complement its San Francisco and Hyderabad bases. (techcrunch.com) (cnbctv18.com) (economictimes.indiatimes.com) The pitch lands in a crowded market for AI training and evaluation work, where Scale AI, Surge AI, Turing, and Mercor are also selling data-labeling, evaluation, and reinforcement-learning services. Deccan is betting that reliability itself is now a product category. (techcrunch.com)