Pakistani-origin tech veteran Asif Makhani has co-founded Infino AI, which emerged from stealth on Wednesday with $7.5 million in seed funding. Bessemer Venture Partners led the round, with partner Lauri J. Moore backing the investment.
Makhani previously founded and led Amazon CloudSearch at AWS. He also served as CTO at Handshake and held leadership roles at Google and LinkedIn. In addition, he chairs the Aga Khan Education Board for the Western United States. He also sits on the board of Qist Bazaar, a Pakistani fintech company.
Moreover, his co-founders bring equally strong credentials. Murali Krishna serves as chief architect, while Vinay Kakade leads engineering. Ekechi Nwokah serves as CEO. Together, the team built and operated ML and search systems at Amazon, Google, and LinkedIn. Notably, they launched AWS’s first search service roughly 15 years ago.
Furthermore, Infino builds a unified retrieval layer specifically for AI agents. It combines full-text search, vector search, and SQL into a single platform over Apache Parquet in object storage. As a result, companies no longer need to glue together a search engine, a vector database, and a data warehouse separately.
CEO Nwokah calls AI agents “the largest new consumer of data since the web browser.” Therefore, the company designed Infino to handle this shift with a simpler architecture. The platform embeds retrieval functions directly in SQL. Consequently, a single query can deliver ranked results, exact counts, joins, filters, and aggregates together.
In addition, Infino stores search indexes inside Parquet files. Iceberg and Hudi can manage the same tables. Similarly, Spark, DuckDB, and other Parquet readers can access the data without changes. The company also claims roughly 10x lower cost than traditional search infrastructure.
The core engine uses an Apache 2.0 open-source license on GitHub. Meanwhile, Infino Cloud offers a hosted service with additional features. Overall, Makhani’s latest venture adds to the growing list of Pakistani-origin founders building major AI infrastructure companies in Silicon Valley.
