By Hamza Faisal

Bengaluru-based AI infrastructure startup Simplismart is in talks to raise between $40 million and $50 million at a valuation of $300-400 million, according to The Economic Times' ETtech. If the round closes, it would more than triple the company's valuation from $100-120 million — in a matter of months.

People aware of the development say Peak XV Partners and Damac Digital, the data-centre arm of Dubai-based real estate group Damac, are in discussions to back the round. Simplismart was founded by former engineers from Oracle and Google, and builds infrastructure software for training and running AI models — the picks-and-shovels layer that sits beneath the AI application boom.

The terms on the table

The proposed terms put Simplismart squarely in the sweet spot of this year's AI infrastructure rush: big enough to matter, early enough for investors to dream. At $300-400 million, the company would be valued at roughly seven to eight times the new money going in — the kind of multiple that only holds when investors believe revenue and enterprise adoption are about to take off.

The investor mix is telling. Peak XV Partners, the venture firm that has made India its hunting ground for years, keeps circling the country's AI startups. Damac Digital's presence is newer: a Middle Eastern data-centre operator chasing AI compute demand, which now runs from Dubai to Mumbai. Their interest says as much about where AI's bottlenecks are — data centres, power, and the software that squeezes performance out of expensive chips — as it does about Simplismart itself.

India's AI funding rush keeps accelerating

The talks land in the middle of a busy season for Indian AI funding. Moneycontrol reported in August that Simplismart was already stitching together a $50 million round, and the numbers have only grown since: Sarvam AI raised $300 million, Emergent closed a $130 million round, and Ema has been in talks to raise around $80 million. Investors, faced with a limited pool of credible AI companies in India, are crowding into the same names — and the valuations are rising fast.

The pattern mirrors the global AI-infrastructure trade. Companies that sell compute, model optimization, and the plumbing around large models are raising at punishing multiples because every enterprise AI rollout depends on them. Simplismart's pitch — cheaper, faster model infrastructure built by people who ran systems at Oracle and Google — is exactly what chief information officers are asking for.

Talks are not term sheets

The obvious caveat: none of this has closed. Talks can stall, valuations can come down, and investor syndicates can change before the money moves. What matters for now is the signal — that investors are willing to triple a valuation in months for AI infrastructure, and that capital from both Silicon-Valley-style venture and Middle Eastern data-centre money is converging on the same deal.

If the round closes on these terms, Simplismart will join a short but growing list of Indian AI companies that jumped from small-cap hopefuls to serious-money territory this year. The question every founder in the country will be asking: who's next?

By Hamza Faisal