Sharad Sanghi, founder and CEO, Neysa.US alternative asset manager Blackstone is leading a $1.2 billion (about ₹10,867 crore) investment in cloud infrastructure startup Neysa in what would be the largest-ever funding round in India’s AI space.
The fundraise would be split equally between a primary equity round and debt, Blackstone and Neysa said in a joint-statement.
People familiar with the transaction said Neysa secured an enterprise valuation of $1.4 billion.
The investment would give Blackstone a majority stake in the Mumbai-based AI cloud company. ET first reported in January about Blackstone finalising the deal for Neysa.
The funding round also saw participation from TVS Capital, 360 One Asset Management, and Neysa’s existing backer Nexus Venture Partners. Other existing backers include Z47, Blume Ventures, and Japanese technology conglomerate NTT.
Neysa is the second venture by Sharad Sanghi, who founded Netmagic, one of India’s oldest data centre services firms. Launched in 2023 by Sanghi and former senior Netmagic executive Anindya Das, Neysa offers compute power and software tools to build, run, and manage artificial intelligence (AI) applications to businesses ranging from large enterprises to startups and even government clients.
The company operates in the graphics processing units (GPU)-led cloud and AI infrastructure segment, offering enterprises compute capacity to deploy large-scale AI work. Its clientele spans segments including banks, healthcare providers, manufacturing firms, and media companies. It also services startups and digital-native businesses.
Speaking to ET, Sanghi said the proceeds from Blackstone will help Neysa deploy more than 20,000 GPUs, while also giving it access to the firm’s relationships and ecosystem to engage potential clients such as OpenAI and Anthropic, where Blackstone is an investor.
“India will be one of our largest markets,” said Sanghi. “It’s the biggest consumer of AI, whether with OpenAI, Perplexity, or Anthropic. Given the tax holiday announced in the budget, we expect global frontier labs to set up inferencing clusters here.”
The FY27 budget introduced a tax holiday till 2047 for companies that provide cloud services globally using data centres located in India.
Inferencing clusters are groups of GPUs configured to run trained AI models at scale, handling real-time queries, and predictions. They power the deployment layer, where users interact with AI systems.
“That means we need not just introductions through Blackstone’s relationships but also require supply chain resilience to ensure we can access GPUs quickly,” said Sanghi.
Neysa had also held talks with SoftBank and Lightspeed among others for raising capital by selling minority stakes. “We spoke to multiple players, but we were convinced Blackstone was the right partner,” said Sanghi.
Blackstone’s senior managing director Ganesh Mani said the firm saw an opportunity to invest given the scale up potential in India’s AI infrastructure space, adding that the country, which currently has 60,000 GPUs, is estimated to have over 2 million such processors over a short period of time.
Blackstone currently owns data centres globally with a $130 billion portfolio, including the world’s largest data centre platform QTS and Australia’s AirTrunk, among the largest data centre platforms in the Asia Pacific.
“Our primary objective is to scale this business significantly, and there’s a strong organic path to achieve that,” said Mani. “Where it makes sense to pursue bolt-on opportunities, we’ll do that as well. We’re backing Sharad to build the neocloud and GPU infrastructure space in India.”
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