Blackstone backs Neysa in up to $1.2B financing as India pushes to build domestic AI infrastructure

Neysa, an Indian AI infrastructure startup, has secured backing from U.S. non-public fairness agency Blackstone because it scales home compute capability amid India’s push to construct homegrown AI capabilities.

Blackstone and co-investors, together with Lecturers’ Enterprise Progress, TVS Capital, 360 ONE Asset, and Nexus Enterprise Companions, have agreed to speculate as much as $600 million of major fairness in Neysa, giving Blackstone a majority stake, Blackstone and Neysa advised Trendster. The Mumbai-headquartered startup additionally plans to boost an extra $600 million in debt financing because it expands GPU capability, a pointy improve from the $50 million it had raised beforehand.

The deal comes as demand for AI computing surges globally, creating provide constraints for specialised chips and knowledge heart capability wanted to coach and run massive fashions. Newer AI-focused infrastructure suppliers — sometimes called “neo-clouds” — have emerged to bridge that hole by providing devoted GPU capability and quicker deployment than conventional hyperscalers, significantly for enterprises and AI labs with particular regulatory, latency, or customisation necessities.

Neysa operates on this rising section, positioning itself as a supplier of personalized, GPU-first infrastructure for enterprises, authorities businesses, and AI builders in India, the place demand for native compute continues to be at an early however quickly increasing stage.

“A variety of clients need hand-holding, and loads of them need round the clock assist with a 15-minute response and a few our resolutions. And so these are the sorts of issues that we offer that a number of the hyperscalers don’t,” stated Neysa co-founder and CEO Sharad Sanghi.

Ganesh Mani, a senior managing director at Blackstone Personal Fairness, stated his agency estimates that India presently has fewer than 60,000 GPUs deployed — and it expects the determine to scale up almost 30 instances to greater than two million within the coming years.

That enlargement is being pushed by a mix of presidency demand, enterprises in regulated sectors reminiscent of monetary companies and healthcare that have to preserve knowledge native, and AI builders constructing fashions inside India, Mani advised Trendster. World AI labs, lots of which rely India amongst their largest person bases, are additionally more and more trying to deploy computing capability nearer to customers to cut back latency and meet knowledge necessities.

The funding additionally builds on Blackstone’s broader push into knowledge heart and AI infrastructure globally. The agency has beforehand backed large-scale knowledge centre platforms reminiscent of QTS and AirTrunk, in addition to specialised AI infrastructure suppliers together with CoreWeave within the U.S. and Firmus in Australia.

Neysa develops and operates GPU-based AI infrastructure that permits enterprises, researchers, and public sector purchasers to coach, fine-tune, and deploy AI fashions regionally. The startup presently has about 1,200 GPUs stay and plans to sharply scale that capability, concentrating on deployments of greater than 20,000 GPUs over time as buyer demand accelerates.

“We’re seeing a requirement that we’re going to greater than triple our capability subsequent 12 months,” Sanghi stated. “A few of the conversations we’re having are at a reasonably superior stage; in the event that they undergo, then we might see it sooner quite than later. We might see within the subsequent 9 months.”

Sanghi advised Trendster that the majority of the brand new capital will likely be used to deploy large-scale GPU clusters, together with compute, networking and storage, whereas a smaller portion will go towards analysis and improvement and constructing out Neysa’s software program platforms for orchestration, observability, and safety.

Neysa goals to greater than triple its income subsequent 12 months as demand for AI workloads accelerates, with ambitions to develop past India over time, Sanghi stated. Based in 2023, the startup employs 110 individuals throughout places of work in Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Chennai.