AI company Upscale AI completes $190 million funding, led by Premji Invest, with participation from NVIDIA and others

BlockBeats News, June 22 — AI infrastructure startup Upscale AI announced the completion of a new $190 million funding round, with investors including NVIDIA and Salesforce Ventures. Following this round, the company’s valuation reached $2 billion.

This funding round is part of its Series A extension, bringing Upscale AI’s cumulative funding to $500 million. The round was led by Premji Invest, with new investors including Temasek and Seligman Ventures participating. Existing shareholders including Maverick Silicon, Mayfield, Prosperity7 Ventures, StepStone Group, and Tiger Global continued to participate.

Upscale AI focuses on building network infrastructure for large-scale AI clusters, attempting to address the “compute interconnect bottleneck” in AI training and inference. The company is developing a full-stack AI network architecture covering chips, systems, and software, with the goal of building an open standard network interconnect solution suitable for large-scale AI workloads.

The company said that as AI cluster sizes continue to grow, network performance is becoming a key limiting factor affecting GPU utilization and training efficiency, and inefficient interconnects will directly lead to wasted compute power and higher training costs.

Currently, Upscale AI has been working with multiple hyperscale cloud providers and “new cloud” infrastructure providers on partnership evaluations and deployments, but it has not disclosed specific customer information.

Analysts noted that investment in AI infrastructure is expanding from the model layer to the underlying hardware and network layers, and network interconnects are becoming one of the most closely watched key infrastructure tracks after GPUs.