From $100M Seed to Unicorn in Months: Upscale AI Closes Oversubscribed $200M Series A to Build the First Pure-Play AI Networking Company

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Jan. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Upscale AI, Inc., a category-defining pure-play AI networking infrastructure company, today announced $200 million Series A financing led by Tiger Global, Premji Invest, and Xora Innovation with participation from Maverick Silicon, StepStone Group, Mayfield, Prosperity7 Ventures, Intel Capital, and Qualcomm Ventures. This new investment brings the total funding received to over $300 million.

The rapid investor backing reflects a growing industry consensus: networking is a critical bottleneck to scaling AI, and traditional network architectures designed to connect general purpose compute and storage are fundamentally unsuited for the AI era. The distinction is essential: traditional networking connects endpoints, whereas AI networking unifies the cluster. As specialized AI compute continues to scale, it is increasingly constrained by retrofitted or proprietary networking architectures. Legacy data center network solutions were designed for a pre-AI world, not for the massive, tightly synchronized scale-up required at rack scale.

Upscale AI was built from day one to solve this problem.

Upscale AI unifies GPUs, AI accelerators, memory, storage, and networking into a single, synchronized AI engine. As a core element of Upscale's AI strategy, the purpose-built SkyHammer™scale-up solution enables the unified rack by collapsing the distance between accelerators, memory, and storage, transforming the entire stack into one cohesive, synchronized system. Upscale's AI platform is built on and actively advances open standards and open source technologies, including ESUN, Ultra Accelerator Link (UAL), Ultra Ethernet (UEC), SONiC, and the Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI). The company is an active participant in the Ultra Accelerator Link Consortium, Ultra Ethernet Consortium, Open Compute Project, and SONiC Foundation.

With an additional $200M in new financing, Upscale AI will be delivering the first full-stack, turnkey platform spanning silicon, systems, and software built to interconnect the heterogeneous future of AGI. The company will use the funding to rapidly expand its engineering, sales, and operations teams as it moves into commercial deployment. Upscale AI is experiencing strong early traction for its solutions for hyperscalers and AI infrastructure operators pursuing scalable, open networking alternatives.

Upscale AI's networking solutions are slated to ship this year.

"This investment accelerates our mission to fundamentally re-architect networking for the AI era," said Barun Kar, CEO of Upscale AI. "With a world-class team and strong customer pull, we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build the open AI networking platform the industry has been waiting for."

"Upscale AI has built extraordinary momentum in an exceptionally short time," said Rajiv Khemani, Executive Chairman of Upscale AI. "The market is demanding open, scalable AI networking solutions, and Upscale AI is uniquely positioned to help customers break through today's networking constraints."

Supporting Quotes

• "AI is fundamentally reshaping infrastructure, and networking is at the center of that transformation," said Rohit Iragavarapu, Partner at Tiger Global. "Upscale AI combines deep technical execution with strong industry relationships to build the next generation of AI networking."
• "As AI systems scale, interconnect efficiency has become a defining driver of performance and economics—not just raw compute. What stands out about Upscale AI is not only their purpose-built approach to scale-up networking silicon, but the depth of experience of a team that has successfully built and deployed this class of infrastructure before," said Sandesh Patnam, Managing Partner at Premji Invest. "Their ability to deliver proprietary-grade performance while embracing open standards reflects both strong technical conviction and real-world operating insight. We are excited to partner with Rajiv, Barun, and team again as they build critical infrastructure for the next generation of AI systems."
• "AI workloads are outpacing the capabilities of traditional networks," said Phil Inagaki, Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer, Xora Innovation. "Upscale AI is rebuilding the entire stack from the ground up and leading the effort to democratize AI networking infrastructure at scale."
• "Since our seed investment, Upscale AI has executed with impressive speed and discipline," said Andrew Homan, Managing Partner at Maverick Silicon. "Our continued support reflects strong conviction in both the market opportunity and the team's ability to deliver."
• "From the outset, Upscale AI stood out as a startup well positioned to define its own path in the AI networking space," said John Avirett, Partner at StepStone Group. "Upscale AI has already drawn significant customer interest, and we expect the team to translate that momentum into a strong roster of deployments with leading hyperscalers and AI infrastructure operators."
• "Every computing era has its chokepoint. In the AI era, it's networking," said Navin Chaddha, Managing Partner at Mayfield. "Barun, Rajiv, and their world-class team are reimagining the entire stack from first principles and building an open platform for networking that can support the next generation of AI infrastructure."
• "Upscale AI is perfectly aligned with Prosperity7's vision of backing transformative companies that are pushing the edge of what's possible," said Abhishek Shukla, U.S. Managing Director at Prosperity7 Ventures. "We take a long-term approach to investing, and we see significant potential for Upscale AI to capture strong market demand in the AI networking space in the coming years."
• "Scalability is the top priority for large enterprises evaluating networking solutions, and Upscale AI has architected its entire portfolio for scalability in the AI era," said Srini Ananth, Managing Director at Intel Capital. "By delivering an open, turnkey solution, Upscale AI is removing complexity from networking infrastructure and unlocking scaled AI adoption for enterprises."
• "As AI infrastructure scales, advanced networking is essential to meet the demand of AI workloads," said Quinn Li, Senior Vice President, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., and global head of Qualcomm Ventures. "As an early investor, we're excited to support Upscale AI's team as they push the boundaries of AI networking infrastructure."
• "Collaboration is key for accelerating the future of AI infrastructure," said Robert Hormuth, Corporate Vice President, Architecture and Strategy, Data Center Solutions Group, AMD. "By adopting UALink early, Upscale AI is helping to foster an ecosystem centered on openness, choice, and interoperability."
• "AI networking is on track to become a $100B annual market by the end of the decade," said Alan Weckel, Co-Founder and Technology Analyst at 650 Group. "Upscale AI is entering at exactly the right moment with open, high-performance solutions built to scale."
• "The networking market has reached a clear inflection point with AI," said Sameh Boujelbene, Vice President at Dell'Oro Group. "Upscale AI's SkyHammer architecture makes them one of the most important companies to watch."

About Upscale AI
Upscale AI is a high-performance AI networking company accelerating AI democratization through open-standard, full-stack, turnkey solutions. Its portfolio of silicon, systems, and software is purpose-built for ultra-low-latency networking, enabling breakthrough performance and scalability across AI training, inference, generative AI, edge computing, and cloud-scale deployments.

For more information, visit https://upscaleai.com.

SOURCE Upscale AI