Infino, cofounded by Pakistani origin veteran Asif Makhani, raises $7.5 million

Infino, a US startup building data infrastructure for AI agents, has raised a $7.5 million seed round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. The company announced the round on 6 October, and Dealroom and TechJuice also reported it.

Ekechi Nwokah is chief executive. Murali Krishna is chief architect and Vinay Kakade leads engineering. The fourth cofounder is Asif Makhani, whom TechJuice describes as a Pakistani origin technologist. He founded Amazon CloudSearch at AWS, was chief technology officer at Handshake and held senior roles at Google and LinkedIn.

Makhani also has ties to Pakistan. According to TechJuice, he chairs the Aga Khan Education Board for the Western United States and sits on the board of Qist Bazaar, a Pakistani fintech company.

Infino's pitch is that agents need to search many kinds of data at once. Today a team often stitches together a search engine, a vector database and a data warehouse. Infino combines full text search, vector search and SQL over Apache Parquet files held in cheap object storage. The company says this costs about ten times less than traditional search infrastructure. That figure is the company's own claim and has not been independently checked.

The core engine is open source under the Apache 2.0 licence and is on GitHub. A hosted product, Infino Cloud, adds extra features. Nwokah called AI agents the largest new consumer of data since the web browser, according to Dealroom.

Bessemer partner Lauri J. Moore backed the investment. The company has not published a valuation.

TechJuice presents Infino as part of a growing group of Pakistani origin founders building AI infrastructure in Silicon Valley. The round itself does not involve a Pakistani company or investor, so the link is through its founder.

Reported from Infino's funding announcement, Dealroom and TechJuice.