MeshDefend, an AI enterprise data infrastructure, has raised $2.3 million in its pre-seed funding round led by Kalaari Capital, with participation from Kettleborough VC alongside a group of entrepreneurs, CXOs, executives from leading cybersecurity firms, as well as storage and backup industry veterans.
This is MeshDefend’s first external funding following its founder-led bootstrapped phase.
The funds raised will be used for the development of MeshDefend’s AI-native Operating System for enterprise data infrastructure. The 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.
Founded in 2025 by Tejas Pandit and Ravi Chitloor, MeshDefend aims to provide an 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 an agentic operating system, Agent MeshTM.
MeshDefend is vendor-agnostic and collaborates across data infrastructure vendors.
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.
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.”
Ravi Chitloor, Co-founder & CTO, MeshDefend, said, “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.”
Sampath P, Partner, Kalaari Capital, said, “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.”
