Upscale AI announced that it has raised $190 million in Series A-1 financing. The extension brings the company’s total funding to $500 million and its current valuation to $2 billion. The Series A-1 round was led by Premji Invest. New investors in the round included NVIDIA, Salesforce Ventures, Seligman Ventures, and Temasek. Existing investors Maverick Silicon, Mayfield, Prosperity7 Ventures, StepStone Group, and Tiger Global also participated.
Upscale AI is a pure-play AI networking infrastructure company building full-stack technology across silicon, systems, and software.
The company is developing an open-standard AI fabric designed to connect accelerators, memory, and storage into a high-performance AI engine. The platform is built to reduce network bottlenecks across large-scale synchronized AI workloads, including training and inference for frontier models.
Upscale AI said it is actively engaged with multiple hyperscalers and leading neocloud infrastructure providers. Customer evaluations and deployments are underway across scale-out and scale-up networking environments.
The company plans to use the new funding to scale the business and accelerate delivery of its AI-native networking technology.
KEY QUOTES:
“AI infrastructure is being redefined at cluster scale, and networking is one of the most critical bottlenecks. Upscale AI is building a high-performance, open-standard AI fabric purpose-built for large-scale, synchronized workloads. This investment reinforces our vision and enables us to scale the business as we engage with leading neocloud and hyperscale infrastructure providers to meet growing demand for open, interoperable AI infrastructure.”
Barun Kar, CEO of Upscale AI
“Rajiv, Barun, and the Upscale AI team are tackling one of the most critical bottlenecks in AI infrastructure, and they’re doing it with a world-class team and a differentiated architectural approach. The progress we’ve seen since our initial investment has only deepened our conviction, and we’re thrilled to lead this round and double down on the company’s vision.”
Sandesh Patnam, Managing Partner at Premji Invest
“The next leap in AI performance will be won in the networking that ties compute, memory, and storage together. What excites us is how Upscale AI is reimagining AI networking with an open-standard, full-stack approach that gets accelerators, memory, and storage operating in lockstep. At Mayfield, we invest in people first, and we’re proud to partner with Barun and Rajiv as they build an enduring company powering the era of frontier AI.”
Navin Chaddha, Managing Partner at Mayfield
“Building the future of AI requires a rethink of underlying data center infrastructure, particularly as organizations demand scalable, interoperable systems that avoid vendor lock-in. Upscale AI addresses this challenge by combining a commitment to open networking standards with a zero-packet-loss architecture that maximizes hardware utilization. Their work is vital to unlocking the potential of high-density AI workloads, and this is the right team to be innovating here. We are thrilled to partner with them.”
Emily Zhao, Managing Director at Salesforce Ventures
“The next major bottleneck in AI data centers is networking, alongside compute. As AI clusters scale across increasingly heterogeneous environments, open-standard fabrics will become critical to enabling performance, interoperability, and infrastructure flexibility. Upscale AI is addressing this challenge with a full-stack, open-standard architecture purpose-built for the realities of modern AI workloads. We’re excited to partner with repeat founders Rajiv and Barun as they build the next-generation networking company for the AI era.”
Umesh Padval, Managing Partner at Seligman Ventures
“What stands out about Upscale AI is the team’s ability to take on complex, system-level challenges and execute with clarity. We believe they are building with a long-term view of how AI infrastructure needs to evolve, with an innovative AI networking portfolio purpose-built for large-scale training and inference of frontier models.”
John Avirett, Partner at StepStone Group
“Upscale AI continues to embody the type of category-defining innovation we look for as investors. Our decision to deepen our investment reflects our long-term conviction in both the team and the market opportunity ahead. As demand for AI networking infrastructure accelerates, we believe Upscale AI is well positioned to build lasting leadership in this space.”
Abhishek Shukla, Managing Director of Prosperity7 Ventures US
“Upscale AI is one of the fastest-growing companies in the AI networking space. As the team makes rapid progress building out our product portfolio, this investment will help us execute on immediate priorities while advancing Upscale AI’s long-term ambitions.”
Rajiv Khemani, Executive Chairman of Upscale AI
