Gruve

What it is

Gruve is a Redwood City-based enterprise AI services company founded by Tarun Raisoni, who previously built Rahi Systems to roughly $400 million in trailing sales without outside capital before its $217 million acquisition by Wesco International. Gruve has raised $87.5 million from Mayfield, Xora Innovation, and Cisco Investments, and reached a standing start in the enterprise market by acquiring three operating companies — NetServ, Lumos Cloud, and SecurView — to import talent, partnerships, and customers in one motion, with Cisco serving as both channel partner and investor. Its core thesis is the intelligence boundary: the undefined line between the data an enterprise hands a frontier model and the understanding that model derives from it. Gruve routes workloads across three tiers — frontier models for low-IP-density tasks, fine-tuned open source models inside the client's own ecosystem for genuinely proprietary work, and fully sealed environments for data, metadata, and algorithms that should never reach an external model — and sells outcome-based security and AI services rather than billable hours.

Who it's for

Enterprise security, IT, and engineering leaders who need a hybrid AI strategy that keeps proprietary data and algorithms out of frontier models where the risk is highest, and founders weighing whether their own AI spend is producing measurable productivity or just an investor-subsidized bill that is about to get more expensive.

Why it's better

• •Classifies workloads into a three-tier hybrid model instead of defaulting everything to a single frontier model, so crown-jewel data and algorithms never leave the client's environment.
• •Prices and delivers as outcome-based services rather than time and materials, with Mayfield citing software-like seventy to eighty percent gross margins as the reason venture capital now funds a services company.
• •Acquisition-led go-to-market (NetServ, Lumos Cloud, SecurView) imported an existing enterprise customer base instead of cold-starting against enterprise sales cycles that punish new logos.
• •Founder Tarun Raisoni built and sold Rahi Systems to a $217 million outcome entirely without outside capital, then reinvested that operating experience into Gruve's own $87.5 million raise.
• •Treats security and red teaming as a domain where a frontier model should never directly see your environment — purpose-built tools sit on top and return findings without exposing your data.