QUICK TAKE:
| Company: | Neysa—AI Acceleration Cloud platform, Mumbai. Founded 2023 by Sharad Sanghi & Anindya Das. 110 employees. |
| Round: | $1.2 Billion total: $600M equity (Blackstone majority) + $600M planned debt financing |
| Valuation: | ~$1.4 Billion (ET report)—11x jump from $128M Series A valuation in just 12 months |
| Milestone: | India’s 2nd unicorn of 2026 — after Juspay (WestBridge-led $50M, January 2026) |
| 🔧 Use of Funds: | Deploy 20,000+ GPUs across India for sovereign AI compute infrastructure |
| Revenue Target: | 3x revenue growth in the next 12 months; eyes Asia-Pacific expansion beyond India |
| Co-Investors: | Teachers’ Venture Growth, TVS Capital, 360 ONE Asset, Nexus Venture Partners |
THE STORY
Mumbai-based AI cloud startup Neysa has completed the single largest AI infrastructure fundraise in Indian startup history — a $1.2 billion capital raise led by Blackstone, the world’s largest alternative asset manager, in a deal that gives Blackstone a majority stake in the two-year-old startup. The transaction, announced on February 16, 2026—timed deliberately to coincide with the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi—catapults Neysa to a ~$1.4 billion valuation, making it India’s second unicorn of 2026 after Juspay. For a company that raised its first rupee in early 2024, this is the fastest valuation ascent in India’s AI infrastructure history.
WHY THIS MATTERS
This is not just a funding story. Blackstone — a $1.3 trillion AUM firm whose AI infrastructure portfolio already includes CoreWeave, QTS, and AirTrunk — has never before taken a majority stake in a two-year-old Indian startup. The fact that it chose Neysa—and structured the deal as $600M equity plus $600M debt to maximize GPU deployment velocity—signals one thing with brutal clarity: India’s GPU shortage is so severe, and the sovereign compute opportunity so large, that the world’s biggest private equity firms are moving before the gold rush peaks. Blackstone estimates India currently has fewer than 60,000 GPUs deployed—and expects that number to scale nearly 30x to 2 million+ in the coming years.
Deal Anatomy: Breaking Down the $1.2 Billion Structure
| Metric | Amount | Blackstone’s Role | Strategic Read |
|---|---|---|---|
| Equity Raise | $600 Million | Lead investor, majority stake | Full operational control + board seats |
| Debt Component | $600 Million (planned) | Facilitator | Capital-efficient GPU procurement at scale |
| Total Capital | $1.2 Billion | Lead / Majority | Largest AI infra raise in India’s history |
| Post-Money Valuation | ~$1.4 Billion | Blackstone + co-investors | 11x jump from $128M Series A (Oct 2024) |
| GPU Target | 20,000+ | Operations | Addresses India’s critical AI compute deficit |
| Prior Funding | $50 Million total | Nexus, Z47, NTT VC | $20M seed + $30M Series A (2024) |
“India’s AI ambition requires production-grade infrastructure built and operated at scale. Neysa is focused on delivering the execution layer of sovereign compute and AI research enablement and adoption in alignment with the goals of the IndiaAI Mission. We seek to provide performance certainty and data assurance, enabling enterprises, hyperscalers, and global AI labs to deploy and scale reliable AI infrastructure in India.” — Sharad Sanghi, Co-Founder & CEO, Neysa
“Digital infrastructure is one of our highest-conviction investment themes globally. This investment positions Neysa to play a meaningful role in advancing AI infrastructure in India and enables businesses and public institutions to deploy AI technologies more effectively as AI adoption accelerates.” — Ganesh Mani, Senior Managing Director, Blackstone Private Equity
Neysa’s Valuation Rocket: From Zero to Unicorn in 24 Months
| Round | Date | Amount | Key Investors | Valuation (Est.) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | Early 2024 | $20 Million | Z47, Nexus Venture Partners, NTT VC | Not disclosed |
| Series A | Oct 2024 | $30 Million | Nexus VP (co-lead), NTT VC, Z47 | ~$128 Million |
| Blackstone Mega Round | Feb 2026 | $600M equity + $600M debt | Blackstone (majority), Teachers’ VG, TVS Capital, 360 ONE, Nexus | ~$1.4 Billion 🦄 |
The trajectory is staggering. Neysa went from a $128 million Series A valuation in October 2024 to a $1.4 billion unicorn valuation in February 2026—an approximately 11x jump in roughly 16 months. For context, at the Series A, Nexus Venture Partners and Z47 were the largest external shareholders with 16.22% each, while founders Sanghi and Das held a combined 43.09% stake. Post-Blackstone majority, the cap table will shift dramatically.
India’s Compute Deficit: The Problem Neysa Is Solving
The Blackstone investment did not happen in a vacuum. India is in the midst of a sovereign compute crisis that every major AI development initiative—from the IndiaAI Mission to Mukesh Ambani’s ₹10 lakh crore Jio pledge—is racing to address.
India’s GPU Gap: The Numbers
|
India’s AI Infrastructure Wars: Who’s Competing?
| Company | Valuation | Funding | GPU Focus | Key Differentiator |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Neysa | ~$1.4 Bn | $1.2 Bn | 20,000+ target | Blackstone majority; sovereign + enterprise; Indo-AI Mission aligned |
| Krutrim (Ola) | ~$1 Bn | $50 Mn (2024) | Undisclosed | Bhavish Aggarwal-led, India’s first AI unicorn, with a multilingual LLM focus |
| E2E Networks | Listed (BSE) | Public | 2,000+ (H100s) | India’s only listed cloud: H100 GPU cloud; NBFC-financed expansion |
| Yotta Data Services | Private | Undisclosed | Undisclosed | Hiranandani Group-backed data centre focus: Navi Mumbai + Noida |
| Jio Intelligence (Reliance) | Strategic | ₹10 lakh crore (7 yr) | Gigawatt scale | Ambani’s sovereign infra play: 120 MW coming online H2 2026 in Jamnagar |
Why Blackstone? The Global ‘Picks & Shovels’ Strategy
Blackstone’s investment in Neysa is not an isolated India bet—it is part of a systematic global strategy to own the ‘picks and shovels’ of the AI revolution. Blackstone’s AI infrastructure portfolio already spans QTS (data centers), AirTrunk (Asia-Pacific data centers), and CoreWeave (GPU cloud), alongside equity stakes in OpenAI and Anthropic. The firm has also earmarked $6 billion specifically for Maharashtra data center development in India, of which the Neysa deal is the inaugural deployment.
Amit Dixit, Head of Asia Private Equity at Blackstone, framed it plainly: “It reinforces Blackstone’s focus on backing the essential ‘picks and shovels’ of AI globally, including in India, a key market.” Critically, Neysa’s onboarding of Blackstone also gives it indirect access to Blackstone’s portfolio companies as potential enterprise GPU cloud customers—a warm pipeline that no other Indian AI cloud startup can match.
STARTUPFEED INSIGHT
| What the Numbers Say: At $1.2B raised to deploy 20,000 GPUs, Neysa is spending ~$60,000 per GPU in total infrastructure cost—roughly in line with global data center build-out costs for H100/H200 clusters. This means Neysa isn’t inflated. It’s priced for reality. | |
| For Founders: | Neysa’s raise proves the Indian AI infra category is now a prime PE target, not just VC. If you’re building in GPU cloud, storage, AI networking, or power infrastructure, PE is your funding lane, not Series B VCs. |
| For Investors: | The 11x valuation jump from Series A to unicorn in 16 months shows that AI infrastructure companies in India are repricing to global comps (CoreWeave, Lambda Labs). Watch Neysa’s revenue multiple at IPO — it will set the benchmark for the whole sector. |
| For Enterprises: | Neysa’s mandate is clear: bring regulated BFSI and healthcare companies onto the sovereign Indian GPU cloud. If you’re a CTO in a bank or hospital group and you’re still running AI workloads on US hyperscaler infra, you just got a local, compliant alternative with Blackstone-grade backing. |
| Our Prediction: Neysa will file for IPO by Q2 FY28, positioning as India’s answer to CoreWeave. By then, its 20,000 GPU deployment will be live, and it will claim the sovereign compute market leadership position ahead of Jio Intelligence (which is building for the 2026–27 Go-Live). Expect Neysa’s IPO valuation to be pegged at $3–4 billion based on 5–8x revenue multiples. SoftBank, which was in early talks, may re-emerge as an anchor investor. | |
