Exclusive: Upscale AI wants to be the next Cisco—and it just raised another $190 million

Every time computing has fundamentally changed, a new networking company has risen with it. When PCs started connecting to the internet in the 1990s, Cisco and Juniper built the plumbing. When the internet moved into the cloud, Arista and Broadcom took over. Upscale AI is betting AI is that same kind of paradigm shift—and that it’s the company to build the network for this one. The Santa Clara, Calif., startup raised $190 million in a Series A-1 round, bringing its total funding to $500 million and its valuation to $2 billion—all in under 18 months, Fortune learned exclusively. Premji Invest, a $15 billion investment fund that previously backed one of the founders’ earlier exits, led the round. New investors include Nvidia, Salesforce Ventures, Temasek, and Seligman Ventures, alongside returning backers Mayfield, Tiger Global, StepStone, Maverick Silicon, and Prosperity7. The opportunity Upscale is chasing is enormous. Spending on AI data center switches is forecasted to surpass $100 billion annually by 2030, according to Dell’Oro Group, as Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon race to build out AI infrastructure. The five largest tech companies will spend roughly $660 billion to $690 billion on infrastructure in 2026 alone, nearly doubling what they spent in 2025. “Legacy data center networks were designed for a pre-AI world, not for the massive, tightly synchronized scale-up required by modern AI workloads,” Umesh Padval, managing partner at Seligman Ventures, told Fortune. Upscale is trying to solve an AI chip communication issue. Right now, the graphics processing units that power tools like ChatGPT mostly can’t talk to each other efficiently unless they’re all from the same manufacturer. It’s like if your laptop could only connect to the internet if every device in your house was also made by the same company. Upscale is building what it calls an open-standard networking fabric that lets chips from different manufac