MeshDefend raises $2.3 million to bring AI intelligence to enterprise data

Kalaari Capital leads the pre-seed round as the startup, founded by former Dell executives, builds an AI-native platform to secure and automate enterprise data infrastructure

MeshDefend, a cybersecurity startup focused on safeguarding enterprise data systems, said it has raised $2.3 million in pre-seed funding.

 

The round was led by Kalaari Capital, with participation from Kettleborough VC and a group of entrepreneurs, corporate executives, and industry veterans from leading cybersecurity, storage, and data-backup firms.

 

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, 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.

 

“We are on a mission to make every organisation’s data infrastructure intelligent, autonomous, and secure. AI has advanced rapidly, yet data infrastructure operations still struggle for intelligence and context,” said Tejas Pandit, co-founder and chief executive officer, MeshDefend. “We aim to transform that reality by elevating the day-to-day of IT infrastructure teams, starting with backup and storage administrators.”

 

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, manage 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.

 

“Enterprises today are under constant pressure to ensure data resilience, availability and operational efficiency. With data spread across on-prem data centres, multi-cloud, modern and traditional data estates, every organisation is grappling with diverse technologies, softwares and tools,” said Ravi Chitloor, co-founder and chief technology officer, MeshDefend. “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.”

 

Sampath P, partner, Kalaari Capital said the next evolution of enterprise infrastructure will be defined by context-aware AI that amplifies resilience and return on investment. “Tejas and Ravi’s combination of technical depth and market understanding makes them ideally suited to shape this transformation,” said Sampath.

 

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 said it stands at the forefront of an emerging shift toward autonomous, AI-powered IT operations.