AuxoAI Raises $20.7 Million Series A From NTTVC to Hire More Forward Deployed Engineers
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AuxoAI Raises $20.7 Million Series A From NTTVC to Hire More Forward Deployed Engineers
The Indian-founded enterprise AI firm will spend on engineers placed inside customers. Entrackr and Inc42 disagree on founders' names and an investor, and neither reports revenue.
AuxoAI, a San Francisco enterprise AI company founded in 2023 with engineering hubs in Mumbai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad, raised a $20.7 million Series A led by NTTVC, Entrackr and Inc42 reported on Oct. 21. The money is for forward deployed engineers, the staff who work inside a customer's business to build its AI workflows.
Inc42 puts the round at over ₹195 crore. Neither report gives a valuation, revenue, headcount or an earlier round.
Where the two reports disagree
The outlets describe the cap table differently, and the company's announcement was not available to check which is right.
| Item | Entrackr | Inc42 |
|---|---|---|
| Lead | NTTVC | NTTVC |
| Angel investor | Amit Zavery | Amit Zavery, CPO and COO of ServiceNow |
| Angel investor | George Still Jr. | George Still Jr. of Norwest Venture Partners |
| Angel investor | Giacomo Sonnino | Giacomo Santina, Managing Director at Charlesbank Capital Partners |
| Founders | Amaresh Tripathy, Arvinder Pal Singh, Kabir Singh | Avaneesh Tripathi, Avinder Pal Singh, Kabir Singh |
| Named customers | UKG, Fogo de Chão | Athlonearth, Fogo de Chao |
The third investor and two of the three founders carry different names in each report. This article does not pick a spelling for them. The shared facts are NTTVC as lead, a 2023 founding, and Fogo de Chão as a customer.
What AuxoAI sells
Both outlets describe the product as Damia, a proprietary forward deployed engineering workbench, which Inc42 calls an AI workbench for enterprise delivery. AuxoAI is a Google Gemini Enterprise transformation partner and an AWS Advanced Tier partner. Entrackr adds that it was named an AI Pureplay Partner at Google Next, part of Google's $750 million enterprise AI investment.
Inc42 quotes the company as saying it has worked with more than 40 clients in manufacturing, healthcare, consumer goods and telecom over three years. The company did not say how many of them are repeat or paying customers today.
The model under scrutiny
The business that AuxoAI's money funds is under attack in an opinion column on Crunchbase News published Oct. 19. Anurag Gurtu, co-founder and CEO of Airrived, argues that some enterprise AI startups send engineers to build workflows by hand and book the revenue as software ARR. "Software ARR should get cheaper to deliver as it scales," he wrote. "Human-powered ARR does not."
The column does not mention AuxoAI. It does give hiring numbers: Indeed postings for forward deployed engineers rose from 643 in April 2025 to 5,330 in April 2026, as the column cites them. That is 8.3 times.
- April 2025643 postings
- April 20265330 postings
Source: Crunchbase News guest column by Anurag Gurtu (Oct. 19, 2026), citing Indeed; accessed 2026-10-21
The column also cites posted base pay of $280,000 to $320,000 at Anthropic and $185,000 to $300,000 plus equity at OpenAI for these roles. AuxoAI's reported hubs are in Mumbai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad; neither report says where its forward deployed engineers sit or what they are paid.
What is not disclosed
AuxoAI has not said what share of revenue comes from software and what share from engineer time, which is the figure Gurtu's argument turns on. It has not published ARR, gross margin or the number of forward deployed engineers it employs today.
For other Indian-linked rounds on the site, see Even Healthcare's $50 million Series B, and for an investor-side view of the market, Inspired Capital's $450 million Fund IV.
The company said the funds also go to its technology and ecosystem partnerships. It has not given a hiring target or a date.
Sources
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