Bangalore: MeshDefend today announced it has emerged from stealth with $2.3 million in Pre-seed funding. MeshDefend is building next-generation intelligence for how enterprises run, protect, and scale their mission-critical data systems. The round was led by Kalaari Capital, with participation from Kettleborough VC alongside a group of entrepreneurs, CXOs, executives from leading cyber security firms as well as storage and backup industry veterans.
This marks MeshDefend’s first external funding following its founder-led bootstrapped phase. The investment will support the development of MeshDefend’s AI-native Operating System for enterprise data infrastructure.
The Pre-seed investment will accelerate product development velocity, go-to-market execution, and enterprise-scale infrastructure readiness. MeshDefend also plans to expand its presence in the US and Europe, while deepening strategic partnerships with leading infrastructure vendors. MeshDefend is vendor agnostic and collaborates across data infrastructure vendors.
Founded in 2025 by former Dell Executives Tejas Pandit and Ravi Chitloor, MeshDefend’s vision is to provide AI-native platform for enterprise data infrastructure, enabling large-scale enterprises, Managed Service Providers (MSPs), and Global System Integrators (GSIs) to transform seamless implementation, resilient operations and faster support with agentic operating system, Agent MeshTM. It has intelligent automation with enterprise level accuracy, scale and security. Their MVP caters to this vision starting with Day-2 Operations for Data Protection and Storage.
Commenting on the Funding, Tejas Pandit, Co-founder & CEO, MeshDefend said, “We are on a mission to make every organization’s data infrastructure intelligent, autonomous, and secure. AI has advanced rapidly, yet data infrastructure operations still struggle for intelligence and context. MeshDefend aims to transform that reality by elevating the day-to-day of IT infrastructure teams, starting with backup and storage administrators. We are collaborating with infrastructure vendors, hyperscalers, MSPs, and GSIs to co-build impactful use cases on our Agent MeshTMoperating system.”
“Enterprises today are under constant pressure to ensure data resilience, availability and operational efficiency. With data spread across On-Prem Data Centers, Multi-Cloud, Modern and Traditional Data Estates every organization is grappling with diverse technologies, softwares and tools. We have built MeshDefend to bring context-aware AI to the heart of data infrastructure operations simplifying complexity and improving resilience across multi-vendor and hybrid cloud environments.” added Ravi Chitloor, Co-founder & CTO, MeshDefend
Sampath P, Partner, Kalaari Capital commented, “We believe the next evolution of enterprise infrastructure will be defined by context-aware AI that amplifies resilience and ROI. MeshDefend’s AI-native Agentic OS embodies that future, bringing automation, security, and intelligence into the heart of data operations. Tejas and Ravi’s combination of technical depth and market understanding makes them ideally suited to shape this transformation. We are excited to partner with them to build the next generation of secure and reliable data infrastructure.”
With a lean team of engineers, MeshDefend brings together deep domain expertise in storage, backup, recovery, and cyber resilience, leveraging frontier AI technology to help enterprises reduce operational complexity, strengthen security, and improve uptime. Enterprises are still in the early stages of embracing agentic solutions for IT operations, presenting a massive opportunity for innovation. The company is currently collaborating with design partners in the IT services sector, GSIs, and infrastructure vendors to bring AI-native operational capabilities to some of the largest enterprise data infrastructure environments globally.
As organisations continue to grapple with the growing scale and complexity of data infrastructure, MeshDefend stands at the forefront of an emerging shift toward autonomous, AI-powered IT operations. With its strong technical foundation, early design partnerships, and backing from leading investors, the company is poised to redefine how enterprises store, manage, protect, and scale their data environments across multiple vendors and hybrid environments in an increasingly AI-driven world.