Team Startupcity

• Nugen raised a pre-seed round of $1M+ led by Antler, with backing from Silicon Valley investors, to accelerate AI research and go-to-market efforts.
• The startup develops Domain-Aligned AI™, enabling organizations to deploy AI safely in high-stakes business workflows by ensuring model behavior aligns with domain-specific reasoning.
• Nugen is assembling world-class research talent in India and aims to work with industries where trust in AI is critical, like legal and finance.

Mumbai and San Francisco-based AI research startup Nugen has raised a pre-seed round of funding to further its mission of making AI reliable for businesses. The round was led by global venture capital firm Antler, with more than $1 million in capital support and GPU perks through its AI Disrupt program. Several well-known Silicon Valley investors also participated. The funds will be used to speed up Nugen’s research and strengthen its go-to-market plans.

While advanced AI models have shown impressive capabilities, many large companies still hesitate to use them for high-stakes business workflows because of reliability concerns. Nugen is addressing this gap through its Domain-Aligned AI™ technology, which uses interpretability research to make AI behavior align with domain-specific reasoning. This approach allows businesses to deploy AI confidently while reducing costly post-training fixes and prompt engineering.

“What excites us most about Nugen is their fundamental approach to solving the reliability problem”, said Winnie Khoo, Partner at Antler. “Instead of treating reliability as an afterthought, they have built it into the deep learning architecture itself. This creates strong technology moats and forms essential infrastructure for businesses to adopt AI at scale”.

The company is bringing together top research talent to tackle AI reliability and alignment challenges. Aakash Patil, Co-founder, holds a Ph.D. in computational mathematics and has done deep learning research at Stanford University. “There’s a clear gap between AI capabilities and organizational trust. Our work bridges this gap with architecture-level reliability, creating research that benefits multiple domains”, he said.

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Mrunmayee Shende, Co-founder, brings experience in deep tech go-to-market strategies across EMEA and APJ markets. “We are building AI infrastructure that helps organizations own their competitive advantage and make it smarter over time”, she added.

Nugen plans to work with AI-first companies in legal, corporate finance, and other trust-sensitive sectors. The startup is also recruiting global research talent in India to work on fundamental AI reliability and alignment, building the foundation for future AI-native societies.