AI company Upscale AI has completed a $190 million financing round, led by Premji Invest with participation from NVIDIA and others

June 22, AI infrastructure startup Upscale AI announced it has closed a $190 million new funding round, with investors including Nvidia and Salesforce Ventures, bringing the company’s valuation to $2 billion. This round is part of Upscale AI’s Series A-1 financing, lifting the startup’s total funding raised to $500 million. Premji Invest led the deal, with participation from new investors such as Temasek and Seligman Ventures, plus follow-on investments from existing shareholders including Maverick Silicon, Mayfield, Prosperity7 Ventures, StepStone Group, and Tiger Global. Upscale AI specializes in building network infrastructure for large-scale AI clusters, focusing on solving the “compute-communication bottleneck” in AI model training and inference. The firm is developing a full-stack AI network architecture spanning chips, systems, and software, with the goal of creating an open-standard network interconnect solution tailored for large-scale AI workloads. The company noted that as AI clusters continue to grow in size, network performance is becoming a key limiting factor affecting GPU utilization and training efficiency. Inefficient interconnects directly lead to wasted computing resources and higher training costs. To date, Upscale AI has partnered with several hyperscale cloud providers and “new cloud” infrastructure providers for evaluations and deployments, though it has not disclosed specific customer information. Analysts point out that AI infrastructure investment is expanding from the model layer to the underlying hardware and network layers, with network interconnect becoming one of the most closely watched critical infrastructure tracks following GPUs.