Sail Research has raised $80 million across seed and Series A rounds to build what it calls the missing plumbing for autonomous AI. The startup, led by Kleiner Perkins, is constructing inference infrastructure specifically designed for AI agents that run for hours, not seconds, across thousands of simultaneous tasks.
What Sail Research actually builds
The company was co-founded by Neil Movva and Samir Menon. Movva’s resume includes stints at NVIDIA, Apple, and Together AI. He also previously co-founded Blyss, an encrypted AI platform built on advanced secure computing methodologies.
Sail’s core product combines high-efficiency open-source model serving with what the company calls “Sailboxes,” persistent sandboxed environments designed to keep AI agents running continuously in the cloud. The Sailboxes support OpenAI-compatible APIs. According to the company, its platform delivers performance that is 12 times more cost-efficient compared to proprietary systems. Sail claims to have already processed trillions of tokens, with applications spanning cybersecurity analysis and automated code review.
Kleiner Perkins partner Aditya Naganath had been developing a thesis around this exact gap in the market before meeting Movva.
