In a massive bet on India’s “sovereign compute” future, Mumbai-based Neysa AI officially achieved unicorn status on February 16, 2026. The startup announced a monumental $1.2 billion funding round, led by private equity giant Blackstone. The deal, which values the company at approximately $1.4 billion, makes Neysa the second Indian startup to cross the $1 billion valuation mark this year, following the fintech firm Juspay in January.
The transaction marks the largest-ever funding round in India’s artificial intelligence sector, signaling a shift in investor focus from AI applications to the “picks and shovels”—the underlying hardware and cloud infrastructure.
The Deal Structure: Equity, Debt, and Majority Control
The $1.2 billion infusion is uniquely structured to fuel capital-intensive infrastructure growth while maintaining a sustainable balance sheet.
| Component | Amount | Purpose / Status |
| Primary Equity | $600 Million | Led by Blackstone; gives them a majority stake. |
| Debt Financing | $600 Million | Planned mobilization backed by the new equity. |
| Enterprise Valuation | $1.4 Billion | An 11x jump from its late 2024 Series A valuation. |
| Co-Investors | — | TVS Capital, 360 ONE Assets, Teachers’ Venture Growth, and Nexus Venture Partners. |
Key Leadership: The round was spearheaded by Sharad Sanghi (founder of Netmagic) and Anindya Das. Blackstone’s Senior Managing Director, Ganesh Mani, stated that the firm is backing “the No. 1 management team in this space” to build the backbone of India’s AI transformation.
Strategic Goal: Deploying 20,000+ GPUs
Neysa is positioning itself as the primary “execution layer” for the IndiaAI Mission. The fresh capital is earmarked for a massive hardware build-out.
- GPU Blitz: Neysa plans to scale its capacity from roughly 1,200 GPUs to over 20,000 GPUs across India. This would account for a third of the country’s current estimated commercial GPU pool (~60,000).
- Sovereign AI: By building local, air-gapped clusters, Neysa allows banks, healthcare providers, and government agencies to process sensitive data without it ever leaving Indian soil—a key requirement for “Sovereign AI.”
- Global Hub: CEO Sharad Sanghi noted that with recent tax holidays for Indian data centers, he expects global “frontier labs” like OpenAI and Anthropic to use Neysa’s infrastructure for their Indian inferencing clusters.
The “Velocis” Platform
Neysa’s core product, Neysa Velocis, is an AI-native cloud abstraction layer. It simplifies the AI lifecycle for enterprises by:
- Orchestration: Managing complex GPU workloads across multiple environments.
- Cost Governance: Providing real-time transparency into compute spending.
- Security: Offering enterprise-grade protection for proprietary models and training data.
“India’s AI ambition requires production-grade infrastructure built and operated at scale. We are delivering the execution layer of sovereign compute in alignment with the goals of IndiaAI Mission.” — Sharad Sanghi, Co-founder & CEO, Neysa.
