Deccan AI raises $25M in funding round

Deccan AI has raised 25 million dollars in its first major funding round. The all-equity Series A round was led by A91 Partners, with participation from Susquehanna International Group and Prosus Ventures. The startup supplies post-training data and evaluation work for AI models. Much of that work is carried out by an India-based workforce of experts. Deccan was founded in October 2024. It is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area with a large operations team in Hyderabad and employs about 125 people. Founder Rukesh Reddy said the company grew 10 times over the past year. It is now at a double-digit million-dollar revenue run rate, with about 80 percent of its revenue coming from its top five customers. Deccan provides services ranging from helping models improve coding and agent capabilities to training systems to interact with external tools. It works with frontier labs on tasks such as generating expert feedback, running evaluations and building reinforcement learning environments. The company also serves enterprises through products including its evaluation suite, Helix, and an operations automation platform. Its customers include Google DeepMind and Snowflake. Deccan has onboarded about 10 customers and runs a couple of dozen active projects at any given time. It relies on a network of more than 1 million contributors, with 5,000 to 10,000 active in a typical month.