Explained: What Neysa AI does, why it raised $1.2 billion, and why it matters

Neysa

• Neysa.ai raised $1.2B led by Blackstone for AI infrastructure
• Funds will deploy 20,000 GPUs, boosting India's AI capacity
• Neysa offers GPU-as-a-Service, rivaling AWS and Azure for India

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Indian artificial intelligence infrastructure startup Neysa.ai has raised $1.2 billion in a funding round led by private equity firm Blackstone, marking one of the largest early-stage investments in India’s technology sector. The round includes $600 million in equity and $600 million in debt, with participation from Teachers’ Venture Growth, TVS Capital, 360 ONE Assets, and Nexus Venture Partners.

The capital will be used to deploy around 20,000 graphics processing units across data centres in India, expanding the country’s limited AI compute capacity and positioning Neysa as a core infrastructure provider for enterprise and government workloads.

What Neysa does

Neysa focuses on the infrastructure layer that powers artificial intelligence systems rather than building consumer-facing AI tools. Its platform, Velocis, operates on a GPU-as-a-Service model, allowing companies to rent high-performance computing resources on demand.

Modern AI training relies heavily on specialised chips, most commonly produced by Nvidia, which are costly and often in short supply. Neysa purchases these processors in bulk, installs them in domestic data centres, and provides access through its cloud orchestration platform. Enterprises can train models, run inference workloads, and scale capacity without investing in physical server infrastructure.

Neysa was founded in 2023 by Sharad Sanghi and Anindya Das. Sanghi previously built Netmagic Solutions into a major managed hosting provider before it was acquired by NTT Communications in 2012. Das served as Netmagic’s chief technology officer.

Investors have pointed to this experience in large-scale infrastructure as a key reason for backing Neysa’s capital-intensive business model.

Why Neysa is being compared to AWS and Azure

Neysa is increasingly being viewed as a domestic alternative to global cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure because it offers cloud-style access to large-scale AI computing infrastructure.

While hyperscalers provide AI processing as part of broader cloud ecosystems, Neysa’s platform is designed specifically around GPU-intensive workloads. Its Velocis system focuses on optimising high-performance model training, managing large GPU clusters, and scaling AI compute on demand. For Indian enterprises that require local data hosting, regulatory compliance, and dedicated AI performance, Neysa effectively functions as an AI-focused cloud provider similar in role to AWS or Azure — but built for India’s infrastructure and policy environment.

The funding aligns with the government-backed IndiaAI Mission, which aims to expand domestic computing capacity. Today, many Indian firms rely on foreign cloud providers for AI workloads, often transferring sensitive data beyond national borders.

Using overseas infrastructure raises concerns around privacy compliance, latency, and long-term costs. By hosting GPUs within India, Neysa positions itself as a “sovereign AI” provider, particularly attractive to regulated sectors like banking, telecom, and government agencies.

Competition and the road ahead

India currently has an estimated 60,000 GPUs available for commercial AI workloads. Neysa’s planned deployment would represent a major expansion of national capacity. The company competes with domestic players such as Yotta Data Services and E2E Networks, alongside global hyperscalers.

Neysa plans to expand across multiple data centre locations, strengthen its software orchestration layer, and add detailed usage monitoring tools for enterprise customers. Its ability to secure hardware supply chains and achieve consistent utilisation will be central to whether it can reduce India’s dependence on foreign AI infrastructure over the coming years.