Upscale AI raised $190 million in a Series A-1 round, valuing the Santa Clara, California-based AI networking startup at $2 billion, according to Fortune.
Premji Invest, a $15 billion investment fund, led the round. New investors include Nvidia $NVDA, Salesforce $CRM Ventures, Temasek, and Seligman Ventures. Returning backers Maverick Silicon, Mayfield, Prosperity7 Ventures, StepStone Group, and Tiger Global also participated, according to Reuters. The investment brings the company's total funding to $500 million, all raised in under 18 months.
At its core, the company has developed an integrated stack of hardware, systems, and software designed to link AI chips, memory, and storage so that large models can train and run with reduced latency. More than 80 companies, including AMD $AMD, Intel $INTC, Google $GOOGL, Meta $META, and Microsoft $MSFT, have signed on to support the open standard that underpins Upscale's approach, which is aimed at letting processors from competing chip vendors interoperate at full speed.
"We are trying to get those GPUs to talk the same language," cofounder and CEO Barun Kar said.
Proceeds from the raise will go toward growing Upscale's operations and pushing its AI networking products to market faster. Its headcount has reached several hundred people, a milestone hit within roughly twelve months of the company's founding.
The relationship between lead investor and founder predates Upscale: Patnam's firm had a stake in Innovium, the networking chip company Khemani built before this one, which Marvell eventually purchased for $1.1 billion in 2021. Khemani also previously ran Intel's network processing business and served as COO at Cavium.
Earlier this year, in January, the startup closed a $200 million Series A with Tiger Global, Premji Invest, and Xora Innovation at the helm.
"Legacy data center networks were designed for a pre-AI world, not for the massive, tightly synchronized scale-up required by modern AI workloads," Umesh Padval, managing partner at Seligman Ventures.
Khemani said the company's balance sheet strength is a factor in securing supplier commitments. "To be able to go to our suppliers and lock in that supply, people are interested in seeing how strong our balance sheet is," he said.