Tiger-backed Upscale AI hits unicorn status with $200M raise to fix AI networking
- ByStartupStory | January 23, 2026
As AI models become bigger and more complex, the industry faces a major challenge. While GPUs are getting faster, the networks connecting them aren’t improving at the same rate.
Data centres designed for traditional computing are struggling to handle the massive data flows required for modern AI tasks. For many AI operators, networking has become the biggest obstacle to growth. That gap is exactly what Upscale AI is trying to fix.
The Santa Clara–based startup has closed an oversubscribed $200 million in a Series A funding round, bringing its total funding to over $300 million. This new investment has pushed the company to a unicorn valuation, just months after it raised a $100 million seed round.
The Series A was led by Tiger Global, Premji Invest, and Xora Innovation, with participation from Maverick Silicon, StepStone Group, Mayfield, Prosperity7 Ventures, Intel Capital, and Qualcomm Ventures.
High-performance AI networking
Led by Barun Kar, Upscale AI is a high-performance AI networking company accelerating AI democratisation through open-standard, full-stack, turnkey solutions.
Unlike traditional data-centre networking, which was designed to connect general-purpose servers, Upscale focuses on keeping AI clusters tightly unified. Its platform links GPUs, AI accelerators, memory, storage, and networking into a single, synchronised system built specifically for large-scale AI workloads.
The company’s SkyHammer solution targets scale-up networking at the rack level, cutting latency and reducing the inefficiencies that slow down AI training and inference. Upscale AI is also building its platform around open standards and open-source technologies, offering an alternative to proprietary networking stacks that dominate today’s AI infrastructure.
The company’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.
What’s next?
With the new funding, the company will deliver 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.
“This investment accelerates our mission to fundamentally re-architect networking for the AI era. 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,” says Kar.
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