OneByZero, a Singapore-based enterprise AI startup, closed a $20 million Series A round led by Jungle Ventures, the company announced October 5. It's the firm's first outside capital after running for three years on founder funding and revenue—an unusual stretch in an industry where venture backing often arrives before the product does.
The money comes with a mandate to prove something the enterprise AI sector talks about constantly but rarely executes: putting full-time engineers inside banks and telecom operators to build governed, auditable systems that actually clear procurement in regulated industries. OneByZero has deployed this model across nine markets: Australia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, the US, and Vietnam. Now the company plans to enter Japan.
What OneByZero sells is less a packaged product than an embedded service. Its "Forward Deployed Engineers" sit alongside client teams, building what the company calls AI Coworkers on a platform named NEO. That platform runs inside the customer's cloud environment, designed specifically for the kinds of auditability, governance, and source-code scrutiny that off-the-shelf AI tools struggle to satisfy in heavily regulated sectors. Think banking compliance officers who want to trace every decision an AI system makes, or telecom regulators who demand explainability.
Revenue has more than doubled year-over-year for the past three years, according to the company, though OneByZero declined to share absolute figures or customer counts. Data modernization projects using the platform have accelerated by 50 percent, the company reports, a metric that suggests clients are finding value but leaves plenty of room for interpretation.
The founders bring pedigree. CEO Niket Vaidya previously scaled Unscrambl across Asia before selling that company. His co-founder, Dr. Vibhore Kumar, holds a PhD from Georgia Tech, co-invented IBM's Streams Processing Language at the company's T.J. Watson Research Center, and has 10 patents to his name.
The case studies OneByZero has made public hint at traction in Southeast Asia's largest markets. An Indonesian telecom operator with roughly 95 million subscribers runs more than 50 automated customer journeys on the platform and lifted its chatbot Net Promoter Score from 4 to 30. In the Philippines, PLDT and Smart deployed an automated social-response system that handles 93.7 percent of queries without human intervention, saving an estimated ₱3.38 million annually, according to the company's case study.
VPBank, a Vietnamese lender, offers perhaps the most detailed endorsement. Executive Ken Wong wrote on LinkedIn in October that the bank had rolled out an "Agentic AI Platform, developed in close partnership with OneByZero and AWS," delivering more than 300 capabilities in under six months. The speed matters in an industry where IT projects routinely drag into year-two before delivering anything useful.
Amazon Web Services figures prominently in OneByZero's strategy. The companies signed a three-year Strategic Collaboration Agreement in early September, about a month before the funding round closed. OneByZero holds AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner status with designations in generative AI, machine learning, and telecommunications—stamps of approval that carry weight when selling into enterprise accounts that already run on AWS infrastructure.
"OneByZero stood out because it is already doing what much of the enterprise AI market is still talking about," Yash Sankrityayan, managing partner at Jungle Ventures, said in a statement. It's the kind of line that sounds like boilerplate until you consider how many enterprise AI vendors are still pitching vaporware or struggling to pass basic security reviews.
The company plans to invest the Series A capital in expanding the NEO platform, building industry-specific templates, and supporting deployments on open-weight and smaller language models—an approach that hedges against the cost and lock-in risks of relying solely on frontier models from OpenAI or Anthropic. OneByZero's team size sits somewhere between 51 and 200 employees, according to its LinkedIn profile, a range wide enough to suggest the company isn't eager to advertise headcount too precisely.
What remains to be seen is whether the embedded-engineer model scales, or whether it becomes a bottleneck as OneByZero tries to grow beyond its current footprint. Sending skilled engineers to sit inside customer offices works when you have a dozen clients. It gets complicated at fifty, harder still at a hundred. For now, though, the company seems to have found a wedge in markets where trust and compliance matter more than flashy demos—and where showing up in person still counts for something.
