California-based Upscale AI, a startup developing high-performance networking infrastructure for artificial intelligence, has announced a landmark $200 million Series A funding round. The investment brings the company’s total capital raised to over $300 million since its launch last year.
The round was co-led by Tiger Global, Premji Invest, and Temasek-backed Xora Innovation. It also saw significant participation from Saudi Aramco’s venture capital arm, Prosperity7 Ventures, alongside other prominent investors including Intel Capital and Qualcomm Ventures.
Tackling The AI Networking Bottleneck
As AI models continue to grow in size and complexity, global data centers face a critical challenge. Their existing networking systems, originally designed for traditional data transfer, are ill-equipped to handle the immense data volumes and synchronized processing speeds required by modern AI workloads.
This performance gap creates a significant bottleneck, constraining the scalability of AI clusters. While traditional architectures focus on connecting separate endpoints like servers and storage, AI demands a tightly integrated system that operates as a single, unified engine. Upscale AI was founded to address this fundamental gap in the market.
The SkyHammer Solution
Upscale AI is pioneering a full-stack, AI-native networking platform with its innovative SkyHammer system. This solution unifies GPUs, AI accelerators, memory, storage, and networking into a cohesive infrastructure, collapsing the latency between components and transforming data centers into highly efficient, integrated systems.
A key differentiator for the company is its commitment to open standards and open-source technologies, including Ultra Accelerator Link and Ultra Ethernet. This approach offers a powerful alternative to the proprietary, vendor-locked systems that currently dominate the market, providing hyperscalers and AI infrastructure operators with greater flexibility and scalability.
Saudi’s Prosperity7 Backs AI Infrastructure Push
The participation of Prosperity7 Ventures highlights a growing trend of strategic MENA investment into the foundational layers of the global AI stack. This move follows a similar investment by the fund into AI cloud company TensorWave, signaling a clear focus on backing companies building the critical infrastructure needed to power the next generation of artificial intelligence.
For the MENA region, which is rapidly expanding its own AI capabilities and data center capacity, such investments provide strategic insights and access to cutting-edge technologies that are crucial for staying competitive on the global stage.
“This investment accelerates our mission to fundamentally re-architect networking for the AI era,” said Barun Kar, CEO of Upscale AI, adding that the company sees a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to build an open AI networking platform.
About Upscale AI
Upscale AI is a California-based company focused on developing next-generation networking solutions specifically for the demands of large-scale artificial intelligence. The company is building a full-stack, open-standards-based platform to eliminate networking bottlenecks in AI clusters, enabling more efficient scaling and performance for complex AI workloads.
Source: Jawlah
