Y Combinator-Backed Athina AI Just Raised $3M to Make AI Apps 10x Faster

AI will be used in every software product in the next 5 years—but building production-ready AI is very hard.

Athina AI has set its sights on solving one of the most complex problems facing developers today: building and deploying AI applications that are reliable, scalable, and ready for production. Co-founded by Shiv Sakhuja and Himanshu Bamoria, the startup recognized early on that while AI is becoming essential across industries, few companies have the tools to deploy AI at the quality and efficiency demanded by the market.

Backed by Y Combinator, Athina AI has just raised a $3 million seed round led by key industry figures like Denis Yarats, Co-Founder and CTO of Perplexity, and Alex Ratner, CEO of Snorkel AI. Other notable participants include the Kleiner Perkins Scout Fund and GSF India. This latest funding brings Athina’s total funding to $4.1 million and marks a pivotal moment in the company’s growth. “This is a major milestone in our mission to enable teams to build production-ready AI applications and agents,” Sakhuja shared in a LinkedIn post following the announcement.

The new capital will help Athina AI speed up its product development, with the goal of allowing companies to create and deploy AI solutions up to 10 times faster than current industry standards. Sakhuja explained, “AI will be used in every software product in the next 5 years—but building production-ready AI is very hard. Athina AI helps teams collaborate to build, test, and monitor AI applications for production.”

Athina’s approach to AI engineering is comprehensive. It enables users to create, monitor, and improve their AI systems, addressing a critical need for quality control and real-time optimization. As co-founder Bamoria noted, “We’re seeing fast-changing needs from companies, from AI agents to multi-modal applications. Our goal is to help these teams create reliable, production-ready systems.” Athina’s platform empowers users to run automated tests, monitor their AI’s performance in production, and troubleshoot complex workflows that may involve multiple data sources and AI models.

One standout example of Athina’s capabilities is its work with Meesho, a major e-commerce platform serving over 120 million users. Using Athina’s platform, Meesho was able to automate the evaluation of its large language model (LLM) outputs. Athina provided Meesho with tools to evaluate and flag problematic AI responses automatically, enabling faster debugging and maintaining high response quality. With Athina, Meesho streamlined their debugging process by allowing the team to focus only on flagged cases rather than manually sifting through thousands of responses. They also benefited from Athina’s trend analysis tools, which helped them detect issues triggered by updates to models or knowledge bases.

Athina’s solutions are also designed to meet the needs of engineering teams with a sophisticated evaluation framework. According to Bamoria, “Athina allows companies like Meesho to conduct thorough evaluations rather than randomly sampling a few interactions, enabling them to pinpoint issues with more precision and improve overall model performance.” Athina’s evaluation framework includes tools for tracking metrics like response time, accuracy, cost efficiency, and token usage, which can be filtered by customer ID, environment, model, and more.

Athina also simplifies experimentation, allowing companies to run A/B tests and deploy only the best-performing configurations. Meesho, for instance, used Athina to experiment with different prompts, models, and retrieval systems without compromising their live environment. This setup enabled Meesho to roll out new updates like the GPT-4o mini in phases, starting with a small user group, monitoring performance metrics, and iterating quickly. Within three days, they managed a full rollout to millions of users, achieving a cost reduction of 14-15% per chat and cutting evaluation expenses by up to 85%.

The latest funding round marks a significant milestone as Athina plans to expand further into the US market, where it has already gained traction among clients, including tech unicorns like Perplexity, PhysicsWallah, and Doximity. With thousands of new weekly sign-ups, the platform handles millions of logs and evaluations weekly, demonstrating its capability to scale rapidly. Bamoria expressed enthusiasm about this growth, stating, “Athina has been on a phenomenal growth trajectory over the past few months. With thousands of new weekly sign-ups, they handle millions of logs on the platform along with running millions of evaluations every week.”

The company’s story began when Sakhuja and Bamoria spent a summer building AI-powered applications and encountered a widespread issue: the tools for evaluating and refining generative AI models were limited. In response, they developed Athina as a solution for developers, aiming to “supercharge the LLM development lifecycle.” Athina’s offerings range from comprehensive monitoring and analytics to prompt management and experimentation tools. Its ready-made evaluations and custom options simplify the often-tedious process of testing and optimizing AI. The future of software, Sakhuja and Bamoria believe, is undeniably intertwined with AI, and Athina’s mission is to enable AI teams to build, test, and monitor applications with confidence.

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Picture of Anshika Mathews
Anshika Mathews
Anshika is the Senior Content Strategist for AIM Research. She holds a keen interest in technology and related policy-making and its impact on society. She can be reached at anshika.mathews@aimresearch.co
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