Upscale AI, a Santa Clara-based startup, has closed a $200 million Series A round led by Tiger Global, Premji Invest, and Xora Innovation. The oversubscribed funding brings total investment to over $300 million, catapulting the company to unicorn status just months after its $100 million seed round.
The company is developing SkyHammer, a purpose-built scale-up networking solution designed to compete directly with NVIDIA's NVSwitch chips used in NVL72 racks. SkyHammer collapses the distance between accelerators, memory, and storage, transforming the entire stack into one synchronized system—addressing a critical bottleneck in large-scale AI infrastructure.
Investors including Intel Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, Maverick Silicon, and StepStone Group participated. "AI is fundamentally reshaping infrastructure, and networking is at the center of that transformation," said Rohit Iragavarapu, Partner at Tiger Global. The company plans to launch its first SkyHammer products later in 2026.