Kleiner Perkins, WestBridge Capital, Battery Ventures and Emergent Ventures participated in the investment round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners
Artificial intelligence infrastructure company Nexthop AI announced that it has received $110 million in investment led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Participants in the investment round included Kleiner Perkins, WestBridge Capital, Battery Ventures and Emergent Ventures. It should be noted that with this investment, the startup has combined the seed and Series A round. The company’s plan is to use this investment to accelerate the development of networking solutions for cloud and hyperscale AI clusters.
Venture’s field of activity
Nexthop AI focuses on building custom networking solutions for hyperscalers that integrate into optimised cloud stacks. In short, the company offers hardware and software designed to integrate directly with existing cloud stacks. Nexthop AI engineers work together with customer cloud architecture engineers and system operators to tailor custom builds.
The hyperscale and large-scale cloud clusters required to train and deploy large language-modelled AI at scale require large amounts of compute. Enterprises need the stacks of graphics processing units, storage and network architecture used by cloud data centres. However, organisations cannot always customise these stacks within their own structures. This is where Nexthop AI comes in.
According to Anshul Sadana, CEO of Nexthop AI, the company develops its hardware and software together with its customers. Thus, customers can buy the products they want to be built. Networking hardware designed to each customer’s specifications can include a network operating system powered by Nexthop AI and building optical and electrical interconnects from the customer’s supply chain. Networking also plays a critical role in data centre design and ensuring the best possible outcomes for scaling AI.
