Olto, a bold new entrant in the enterprise AI tooling landscape, has raised $5.1 million in pre-seed funding to modernize how companies source, evaluate, and purchase AI infrastructure. The round was led by Nexus Venture Partners, The General Partnership, and Afore Capital, with participation from Recall Capital, FirstHand, and others.

Founded by Kintan Brahmbhatt, Jean-Baptiste Chaput, and Pranav Midha, Olto is building an intelligent marketplace designed to reduce friction and chaos in the rapidly expanding AI procurement ecosystem - where buyers are overwhelmed by tools, vendors, and fragmented workflows.

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What Olto Is Building

Olto is positioning itself as the central nervous system for AI infrastructure procurement. In the face of AI’s meteoric rise, organizations are increasingly struggling with one question: How do we buy the right tools, at the right time, without drowning in complexity?

Olto answers this by creating a data-driven, user-friendly procurement layer that connects enterprise buyers to vetted AI tools across compute, models, APIs, LLMOps platforms, and governance stacks. It streamlines vendor discovery, contract workflows, and budget alignment with three core offerings:

• AI Infrastructure Marketplace with Expert Curation
  
• Procurement Automation with Real-Time Pricing Intelligence
  
• Workflow Collaboration Across Finance, Legal, and Engineering Teams
  

With this approach, Olto aims to cut procurement cycles by over 60%, improve vendor-fit precision, and enable smarter budgeting for AI innovation.

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Why It Matters Now

Enterprises are pouring capital into AI - but wasting enormous time and resources figuring out what to buy and how to buy it. According to IDC, global AI infrastructure spend is projected to exceed $150 billion by 2026, yet 70% of enterprise AI initiatives stall due to procurement misalignment and integration delays.

At the same time, the vendor landscape is exploding. There are now over 10,000 AI tooling vendors across foundational models, vector databases, inference engines, and deployment frameworks. Sorting through this chaos is no longer a side job - it’s a business-critical function.

This is the pain point Olto is laser-focused on: transforming AI procurement from a fragmented mess into a repeatable, intelligent process.

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The Founder's Cheat Code for Complex Markets

Here’s where founders building in B2B infrastructure can learn something crucial: Olto isn’t just building a marketplace - it’s building a high-leverage operating layer where chaos already exists.

Markets with high noise, low trust, and exploding supply (like AI tooling) don’t need more listings - they need decision infrastructure. Olto’s insight was recognizing that the bottleneck isn’t access to tools - it’s the decision paralysis that comes from too much access.

The lesson for startups: the fastest path to stickiness is becoming the system of record for a chaotic, high-frequency workflow. Don’t just connect buyers and sellers - design the rails, build the rules, and automate the friction. That’s what makes Olto more than a directory. It becomes the OS for enterprise AI procurement.

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Meet the Founders

The Olto founding team brings serious pedigree:

• Kintan Brahmbhatt previously led product and growth at Amazon and played key roles in Alexa’s platform strategy and Audible’s transformation.
  
• Jean-Baptiste Chaput brings deep expertise in enterprise procurement, having built infrastructure sourcing platforms for fast-scaling B2B startups.
  
• Pranav Midha, with a background in AI systems engineering and pricing optimization, provides the technical depth to ensure Olto's platform scales intelligently.
  

Together, the team blends AI fluency, enterprise ops, and product intuition - a combination rare and highly valuable in a crowded ecosystem.

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How Olto Stands Out

While there are many procurement platforms in the market, Olto is purpose-built for the AI era. Its differentiation lies in:

1. AI-Native Indexing: Tools are classified by real use cases, model compatibility, compute footprint, latency, and governance readiness - making matching smarter.
   
2. Collaborative Workflows: Unlike legacy procurement stacks, Olto integrates engineering, finance, and legal into one interface - slashing decision loops and approvals.
   
3. Dynamic Pricing Intelligence: By surfacing live pricing benchmarks and usage-based ROI calculators, Olto arms buyers with cost clarity in a rapidly inflating ecosystem.
   

This trifecta of real-time intelligence, buyer collaboration, and vendor curation positions Olto to own the procurement stack as AI adoption surges.

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AI Tooling Market Outlook: A Flood Needing Filters

According to PitchBook, over $22 billion has flowed into AI infrastructure startups in the last 18 months alone. Meanwhile, Deloitte reports that 84% of enterprise leaders find it "very difficult" to choose between AI vendors, and 52% say poor tooling decisions have directly stalled deployments.

As businesses increasingly treat AI as a core strategic capability, procurement inefficiency is becoming a billion-dollar problem. Teams are losing time, budget, and internal trust over chaotic selection processes and mismatched vendor relationships.

This is not just a workflow problem - it’s an organizational risk. Olto’s platform emerges as a governance and acceleration layer, ensuring that AI procurement is transparent, compliant, and scalable.

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What’s Next for Olto

With this fresh $5.1 million infusion, Olto will:

• Expand its AI tool taxonomy to cover edge compute, data infrastructure, and LLMOps
  
• Scale its engineering and partnerships team
  
• Build procurement integrations with leading ERP and contract lifecycle systems
  
• Launch beta pilots with mid-market and enterprise clients in Q4 2025
  

Olto’s ambition is clear: to become the Stripe + G2 + Ironclad of AI tooling, rolled into a single, adaptive procurement brain.

Expect a strong Series A in the next 12 months as traction builds and the platform becomes foundational to how organizations scale their AI strategies.

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