Sharad Sanghi

Sharad Sanghi is one of the architects of India's digital infrastructure. He holds a bachelor's degree in engineering from IIT Bombay (later honored with its Distinguished Alumnus Award) and a master's from Columbia University in New York, where he worked as an engineer on NSFNET — a precursor backbone to the modern internet — configuring routers and managing IP infrastructure. During roughly six years in the US he also worked with the Unified Network Management Architecture group at AT&T Bell Labs before returning to India in 1995, around the time commercial internet launched there.

In July 1998 Sanghi founded Netmagic Solutions with about $4 million in seed capital (an early backer was B.B. Jagdish of Exodus Communications, whom he met at a Delhi tech conference). Netmagic launched India's first commercial data center in October 2000 and, by focusing on B2B enterprise customers, reached profitability within roughly 13 months and survived the dot-com crash largely unscathed. He raised three institutional rounds from investors including Nexus Venture Partners, Fidelity, Cisco Systems and Nokia Growth Partners. In 2012, NTT Communications acquired a 74% stake in Netmagic for about $128 million — then the first major acquisition in India's data-center market — when the company was generating roughly ₹150 crore in annual revenue.

Sanghi stayed on to run the business under NTT for over a decade, ultimately serving as CEO, Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure (India) for NTT Ltd. He scaled the operation to 19 data centers, roughly 300 MW of IT capacity and combined revenues exceeding $400 million — controlling close to a quarter of India's total data-center capacity — before stepping back from the operating role around 2023.

Recognizing the post-ChatGPT surge in demand for specialized AI compute, he launched his second venture, Neysa, an AI-acceleration cloud platform, in 2023. Neysa raised $20 million in seed funding (April 2024) and $30 million in Series A (October 2024, co-led by NTTVC, Z47/formerly Matrix Partners India and Nexus Venture Partners). In February 2026, private-equity funds affiliated with Blackstone led a much larger financing (reported at over $1 billion / a $1.2 billion capital raise) to build out Neysa's AI infrastructure. Sanghi also continues as Chairman of NTT Global Data Centers India and serves on Columbia Engineering's Board of Visitors.

• Invests primarily as a personal angel at the seed / early stage in Indian startups; profile trackers list roughly 9 investments and one board seat.
• Sector lean: enterprise applications, AI/ML, industrial/deep-tech and high-tech — consistent with his infrastructure-and-enterprise operating background.
• Backs founders building hard, infrastructure-heavy or enterprise B2B businesses, the same category in which he built two companies from scratch.
• Operating philosophy that carries into how he backs teams: *"I hire people smarter than me,"* and a long-standing no-layoff, employee-retention discipline through downturns — signaling a preference for durable, people-first company building over hype-driven growth.