GenAI startup subtl.ai shuts down for inability to raise fresh funds

After raising $200K (INR 1.8 Cr) from angel investors, GenAI-focused enterprise tech startup subtl.ai has shut down. 

Cofounder and CEO Vishnu Ramesh shared on LinkedIn that the inability to raise fresh capital, lack of market focus and infra GTM were the key reasons for the shutdown.

The startup’s web domain, subtl.ai, has also expired.

Vishnu Ramesh, founder of Subtl.ai, announced the closure of his company on LinkedIn. “TL;DR: we have started shutting down Subtl.ai,” he wrote. 

About startup subtl.ai

Launched in 2019, the Hyderabad-based startup leveraged GenAI to optimise information discovery on the internet for their client enterprises.

It had bigshot clients like SBI, plus defence contracts, two airports, and a few others.

The startup intended to solve a difficult problem of making enterprise data usable through natural language interfaces.

Ramesh shared that their auto-tuning pipeline, Subtl V2, built by engineers and researchers at IIIT Hyderabad, outperformed RAG built on OpenAI and open-source embeddings by 15-20%.

Reportedly, SBI implemented Subtl.ai, displaying 92% accuracy in information retrieval, and 56,570 minutes were saved (equivalent to approximately Rs 5 lakh).

According to his LinkedIn profile, Ramesh is now building another AI startup.

“Going vertical AI this time!” reads his LinkedIn bio. 

Vishnu Ramesh said that he will not play the “victim”.

“It's completely on me, I failed my team and investors more than they failed me for sure,” he wrote.

“I got stuck handling customers from wildly different domains with wildly different use cases… customers gave no s*** about our other portfolio of work we had done,” he explained.

Despite early wins and a product reportedly called ‘Private Perplexity for Enterprise’, subtl.ai was operating on thin fuel.

Though the startup raised around ₹1 crore in angel funding, it was insufficient to build and maintain a product in an increasingly competitive GenAI market.

‘Some Investors flirt ALOT with founders, but it doesn't mean shit until they give you a term sheet’, Ramesh said.

Their funding had no follow-up rounds, and no external signals of new revenue deals were there.

Subtl built APIs that could have powered AI agents, citations, and document retrieval, but failed to invest in making those APIs developer-friendly. 

“All we did was put a message on our website saying ‘yo reach out if you wanna use our APIs’,” he admitted.

Open-source SDKs, or integrations with tools like LlamaIndex or Portkey, were absent.

There was no real documentation or a developer community.

In September 2024, InsurStaq.ai started shutting shop after one year of operations and is now completely inoperative.

According to Tracxn data shared with Analitics India Mag (AIM), over the last five years, 706 AI startups have failed, of which 54 are from India.

Also read: 'I ran a cloud kitchen for 6.5 years but I'll NEVER do it again!' Startup founder reveals harsh reality of business (startuppedia.in)