Indian private equity firm WestBridge Capital, which backs unlisted companies and also makes private investments in public equities, is investing in California-based artificial intelligence infrastructure startup Nexthop AI as part of the company’s $110-million funding round.
The round was led by venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, Nexthop said in a statement on Tuesday. Marquee American VC firms Kleiner Perkins, Battery Ventures and Emergent Ventures, besides WestBridge, joined the round.
WestBridge recently invested in cloud storage management platform Lucidity and its existing portfolio company Rapido in India.
Nexthop AI, which is led by founder and CEO Anshul Sadana and came out of stealth on Tuesday, said it will use the capital to accelerate the development of its networking solutions for cloud and hyperscale AI clusters.
The startup provides custom networking solutions for the hyperscalers, which are spending extensively to meet evolving GPU and networking needs amid a growing requirement for AI training and inference. This includes building networking hardware designed according to customer’s specifications, a network operating system of their choice, along with pre-tested optical and electrical interconnects from the customer's diverse supply chain.
Nexthop AI is headquartered in Santa Clara and also has a presence in Seattle, Vancouver and Bengaluru.
“The world’s largest cloud providers need a new generation of networking capabilities to keep pace with the demands of AI workloads," said Guru Chahal, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. "Nexthop AI is filling a critical gap in this market with its deep domain expertise, pioneering technology and customized solutions, positioning the company as the go-to partner for leading cloud providers.”
