Neysa, an Indian AI infrastructure startup, has secured backing from U.S. Private fairness firm Blackstone as it expands domestic compute capacity amid India’s push to build homegrown AI capabilities.
Blackstone and co-investors, such as Teachers’ Venture Growth, TVS Capital, 360 ONE Asset, and Nexus Venture Partners, have agreed to make investments up to $600-million of primary equity in Neysa, giving Blackstone a majority stake, Blackstone and Neysa told TechCrunch. The Mumbai-headquartered startup also plans to raise an extra $600 million in debt financing because it expands GPU capability, a rapid growth from the $50 million it had raised formerly.
The deal comes as demand for AI computing surges globally, creating ssupply constraints for specialized chips and data center capacity needed to train and run large models. Newer AI-targeted infrastructure provider— frequently addressed to as “neo-clouds” — have appeared to bridge that gap through supplying dedicated GPU capacity and quicker deployment than traditional hyperscalers, mainly for enterprises and AI labs with particular regulatory, latency, or customization demands.
Neysa works in this developing segment, positioning itself as a provider of customized, GPU-first infrastructure for enterprises, government agencies, and AI developers in India, in which requirements for local compute remains at an early however quickly scaling stage.
“A lot of customers need hand-holding, and a lot of them need want round-the-clock guide with a 15-minute response and more than one our resolutions. And so those are the kinds of things that we offer that some of the hyperscalers don’t,” stated Neysa co-founder and CEO Sharad Sanghi.
Ganesh Mani, a senior managing director at Blackstone Private Equity, stated his firm evaluate that India recently has fewer than 60,000 GPUs deployed — and it anticipate the figure to scale up around 30-times to more than two-million within the coming years.
That enlargement is being powered by a aggregate of government demand, enterprises in managed sectors inclusive of financial services and healthcare that want to hold data local, and AI developers form models within India, Mani informed TechCrunch. Global AI labs, many of which count India among their largest user bases, are also progressively looking to deploy computing capacity closer to customers to reduce latency and meet data necessities.
The investment also construct on Blackstone’s broader push into data center and AI infrastructure globally. The corporation has earlier backed large-scale data centre platforms consisting of QTS and AirTrunk, as well as specialized AI infrastructure providers together with CoreWeave in the U.S. And Firmus in Australia.
Neysa develops and work GPU-based AI infrastructure that allows enterprise, researchers, and public sector clients to train, fine-tune, and deploy AI models locally. The startup presently has about 1,200 GPUs live and plans to rapidly scale that capacity, concentrated on deployments of more than 20,000 GPUs through the years as customer demands increased.
“We are observing a demand that we are going to more than triple our capacity next year,” Sanghi stated. “Some of the conversations we’re having are at a fairly advanced stage; if they go through, then we should see it faster instead of later. We could see in the next 9-months.”
Sanghi told TechCrunch that the majority of the new capital may be used to set up large-scale GPU clusters, along with compute, networking and storage, at the same time as a smaller portion will go toward research and development and forming out Neysa’s software structures for orchestration, observability, and safety.
Neysa pursuits to more than triple its revenue next year as demand for AI workloads increases, with goal to increase beyond India over time, Sanghi stated. Founded in 2023, the startup employs 110 people throughout offices in Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Chennai.
