Pre-seed funding led by Antler VC as part of inaugural AI Disrupt portfolio will accelerate development of breakthrough Domain-Aligned AI technology

Nugen announced pre-seed round to advance its mission of making AI reliable for businesses. Nugen, a Mumbai and San Francisco based AI research startup, develops breakthrough technology that enables organizations to confidently deploy AI in high-stakes business environments. Antler, a prominent global VC firm known for backing exceptional founders, led the round with over $1M combined in capital and GPU perks through their AI Disrupt program, with additional backing from prominent Silicon Valley investors. The funding will accelerate Nugen's research initiatives and enhance go-to-market efforts.

While frontier AI models demonstrate remarkable capabilities, Fortune 500 executives still can't trust these generative models for critical business workflows. To address this challenge, Nugen is pioneering Domain-Aligned AI™ technology through interpretability research that enables alignment and steering of model behavior with domain-specific reasoning, enabling organizations to confidently deploy AI for business-focused outcomes while reducing expensive post-training and prompt engineering iterations.

"What excites us most about Nugen is their fundamental approach to the reliability problem," said Winnie Khoo, Partner at Antler. "Instead of treating AI reliability as an afterthought, they've built reliability measures into the deep learning architecture itself. This creates defensible technology moats and serves as key infrastructure enabling businesses to deploy AI reliably at scale."

Nugen is assembling world-class research talent, pursuing interdisciplinary research for AI reliability and alignment challenges. Aakash Patil, Co-founder, brings deep learning expertise from his previous research at Stanford University and holds Ph.D. from France's topmost computational mathematics program. "There's a critical gap between AI capabilities and organizational trust. Nugen bridges that gap with architecture-level reliability through interpretability, creating foundational research that multiplies impact across every domain," said Patil. Mrunmayee Shende, Co-founder, brings extensive deep tech go-to-market expertise across EMEA and APJ markets. "We are building AI infrastructure that lets organizations own their competitive advantage and make it smarter over time," added Shende. "AI-first companies in legal, corporate finance, and other sectors where trust is non-negotiable are eager to work with Nugen."

Nugen is actively recruiting exceptional global talent to join their research team in India, offering opportunities to work on fundamental AI reliability and alignment challenges while building reliable AI for the future of AI-native societies.

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