Upscale AI

Upscale AI is a full-stack AI networking company building silicon, systems, and software—including its SkyHammer scale-up switch ASIC and open Ethernet scale-out fabrics—to connect GPUs, XPUs, memory, and storage inside the largest AI training and inference clusters. It is aimed at hyperscalers and neocloud providers who need deterministic, low-latency interconnects for AI infrastructure.

Upscale AI is a Santa Clara-based, pure-play AI networking infrastructure startup founded in 2025 by CEO Barun Kar and executive chairman Rajiv Khemani (former Innovium co-founder and CEO). Positioned as 'the network AI was waiting for,' Upscale is building a full-stack platform spanning silicon, systems, and software to remove the interconnect bottlenecks that constrain large AI clusters. Its flagship scale-up product, SkyHammer, is a clean-slate switch ASIC purpose-built to link accelerators, memory, and storage within a rack at very high speed with deterministic latency and predictable performance at scale; scale-up products are slated for release in 2026. For scale-out, Upscale ships open Ethernet fabrics built on NVIDIA Spectrum-X switch silicon paired with a SONiC-based network operating system, and the company backs open standards including UltraEthernet, UALink, and OCP SAI/ESUN. In June 2026 Upscale added a $190 million Series A-1 extension led by Premji Invest, with strategic backing from NVIDIA and Salesforce Ventures, bringing total funding to roughly $500 million at a $2 billion valuation.

Category

Infrastructure & Cloud

Pricing

Contact for pricing

Target Market

CTOs, CIOs, Infrastructure Architects, Cloud/Data Center Operators

Founded

2025

Headquarters

Santa Clara, California, United States

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  SkyHammer scale-up ASIC

  A clean-slate switch silicon purpose-built to interconnect accelerators, memory, and storage within a rack at high bandwidth with deterministic, low latency.

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  Open Ethernet scale-out fabrics

  Scale-out networking built on NVIDIA Spectrum-X switch silicon with a SONiC-based NOS to connect heterogeneous AI clusters.

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  Full-stack silicon, systems, and software

  An end-to-end platform spanning custom silicon through systems and software optimized for AI workload economics and token efficiency.

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  Open-standards architecture

  Supports heterogeneous compute on open standards including UltraEthernet, UALink, and OCP SAI/ESUN to avoid proprietary lock-in.

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  Frontier-model training clusters

  Provide deterministic, high-bandwidth interconnect for synchronized multi-accelerator training at scale.

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  Large-scale inference serving

  Reduce communication bottlenecks between accelerators to improve token efficiency and predictable performance for inference.

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  Neocloud AI data centers

  Give emerging GPU-cloud providers an open, purpose-built AI fabric spanning single racks to large distributed clusters.

Pricing is not publicly listed; scale-up products based on the SkyHammer architecture are announced for release in 2026.

This page was written from 3 sources, 2 on domains other than upscale.com.

1. 1.upscale.com — upscale.comvendor
2. 2.networkworld.com — upscale ai readies skyhammer scale up networking tech raises
3. 3.businesswire.com — Upscale AI Adds $190 Million in Extension to Series A Reachi