Upscale AI Raises $190 in Series A-1 Funding Led by Premji Invest

The round also saw participation from NVIDIA, Salesforce Ventures, Seligman Ventures, Temasek, Maverick Silicon, Mayfield, Prosperity7 Ventures, StepStone Group, and Tiger Global.

The funding round increased the company's total funding to $500 million and raised its valuation to $2 billion. The company plans to use the new capital to expand its operations and speed up the development and delivery of its advanced AI-native networking technology.

Upscale AI is building next-generation networking technology designed specifically for AI workloads. Its platform combines hardware, systems, and software to create a unified AI infrastructure that connects processors, memory, and storage into a high performance network. The technology is designed to reduce bottlenecks, and improve performance for large-scale AI training and inference.

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The company is currently working with several hyperscalers and leading cloud infrastructure providers, with customer evaluations and deployments already underway. Upscale AI plans to use its new funding to expand the business and accelerate the development and delivery of its AI-native networking solutions.

“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,” said Barun Kar, CEO of Upscale AI. “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.”

“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,” said Sandesh Patnam, Managing Partner at Premji Invest. “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.”

“The next leap in AI performance will be won in the networking that ties compute, memory, and storage together,” said Navin Chaddha, Managing Partner at Mayfield. “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.”

“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,” said Emily Zhao, Managing Director at Salesforce Ventures. “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.”

“The next major bottleneck in AI data centers is networking, alongside compute,” said Umesh Padval, Managing Partner at Seligman Ventures. “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.”

“What stands out about Upscale AI is the team’s ability to take on complex, system-level challenges and execute with clarity,” said John Avirett, Partner at StepStone Group. “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.”

“Upscale AI continues to embody the type of category-defining innovation we look for as investors,” said Abhishek Shukla, Managing Director of Prosperity7 Ventures US. “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.”

About Upscale AI

Founded in 2025, Upscale AI is an AI networking infrastructure company that provides end-to-end solutions for connecting different types of computing systems. Its technology is designed to deliver ultra-low-latency, high-performance networking that improves scalability and efficiency for AI training, inference and generative AI applications. By using open standards and a full stack approach, Upscale AI helps organizations build and operate large scale AI environments more effectively.

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