October 9, 2026, (Inside AI) — Infino AI, a startup building a unified data retrieval layer for AI agents, emerged from stealth on Wednesday with $7.5 million in seed funding. The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with partner Lauri J. Moore backing the investment. The company was co-founded by Asif Makhani, a Pakistani-origin tech veteran who previously founded and led Amazon CloudSearch at AWS.
Infino's platform combines full-text search, vector search, and SQL into a single system over Apache Parquet in object storage. This eliminates the need for companies to stitch together separate search engines, vector databases, and data warehouses. The startup claims its approach reduces costs by roughly 10x compared to traditional search infrastructure.
The timing reflects a broader shift in how enterprises handle data for AI. As AI agents become more autonomous, they generate and consume massive amounts of information. Infino's co-founders argue that existing data stacks are ill-equipped for this new workload. "AI agents are the largest new consumer of data since the web browser," said CEO Ekechi Nwokah. "We designed Infino to handle this shift with a simpler architecture."
Makhani's résumé includes founding Amazon CloudSearch, serving as CTO at Handshake, and holding leadership roles at Google and LinkedIn. His co-founders bring similar pedigree: Murali Krishna as chief architect, Vinay Kakade leading engineering, and Nwokah as CEO. Together, they built and operated machine learning and search systems at Amazon, Google, and LinkedIn. Notably, they launched AWS's first search service roughly 15 years ago.
Read: MIT Professor Uses AI to Curb Data Center Energy Use
The technical design centers on embedding retrieval functions directly in SQL. A single query can return ranked results, exact counts, joins, filters, and aggregates together. Infino stores search indexes inside Parquet files, which means Iceberg and Hudi can manage the same tables. Spark, DuckDB, and other Parquet readers can access the data without changes. The core engine is available under an Apache 2.0 open-source license on GitHub, while Infino Cloud offers a hosted service with additional features.
Read: H3C Shifts Focus to Token Efficiency at Apsara Conference 2026
This launch adds to a growing list of Pakistani-origin founders building major AI infrastructure companies in Silicon Valley. Makhani also chairs the Aga Khan Education Board for the Western United States and sits on the board of Qist Bazaar, a Pakistani fintech company. His latest venture enters a competitive field, but the team's deep experience in search and ML at scale gives it credibility. The seed round will likely fund further development and go-to-market efforts as Infino seeks to attract enterprises looking to simplify their AI data pipelines.
