While India is much from the uncanny valley of San Francisco, it has an amazing pool of talented engineers, and a few of these individuals are jumping on the bandwagon and becoming founders and builders of AI startups.
The story of the AI startup ecosystem in India today is paying homage to the early days of SaaS within the country: funding is proscribed—especially in comparison with the billions raised by AI startups within the US and Europe. But in areas like generative AI, we're seeing signs of where the enterprise capital goes. It's going to homegrown talent solving problems specific to their a part of the world and developing recent approaches to the identical challenges faced by their counterparts in developed markets.
Some Indian startups wish to integrate local language support into their AI models to fulfill the growing demand of Indian consumers. And some Indian startups like Pepper Content and Pocket FM are also using AI to create use cases for markets outside India and to tap into the US market.
But that doesn't mean it's been easy. In India, funding for AI startups — including those working on infrastructure and services — fell nearly 80% in 2023 to $113.4 million from $554.7 million in 2022, in accordance with Tracxn data shared with TechCrunch. In contrast, funding for AI startups within the US rose about 211% last yr to $16.2 billion from $5.2 billion in 2022. To date, investment in AI startups within the US has reached a whopping $13 billion. During the identical period, only $92 million was invested in Indian AI startups.
Dev Khare, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners India, told TechCrunch that India offers some good opportunities for AI in consumer applications, be it creating content in Indian languages, offering virtual influencers or creating short videos and games using AI.
“Lots of the SaaS market during the last decade has focused on established markets and tried to duplicate them at a lower cost and with higher support. That very viable market has produced some great ends in India. But you possibly can't do this in an emerging market like AI or native AI. You need to take a risk and say, 'This is what the world will seem like in a number of years. That market doesn't exist today, but I bet it does. I'm going to construct on that.' That's slightly newer DNA for India. We've seen that before,” he said.
In the last 18 months, Lightspeed India and SEA has invested over $150 million in AI, including recent investments and follow-on investments in existing AI startups. Globally, the fund has invested greater than $1 billion in over 70 AI corporations in the identical period.
Global and native investors are actively on the lookout for AI startups in India because the country helps them diversify their portfolios and is in a greater position amid ongoing geopolitical conflicts in key markets. Growing concerns about data sovereignty across countries can also be a reason to search for local startups developing promising solutions for the world's most populous country.
Indian AI startups which have raised essentially the most money
Founder: Bhavish Aggarwal
Total funding raised: 50 million US dollars
Important investors: Matrix Partners India
Led by Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal, Krutrim (Hindi with Sanskrit roots, meaning “artificial”) is India's first unicorn AI startup, valued at $1 billion with just $50 million in capital. Founded in Bengaluru in December 2023, Krutrim is developing a big language model (LLM) based on Indian languages and English. Earlier this yr, it unveiled an AI chatbot that (not unlike its Western counterparts) saw a backlash when the general public beta version was released as a consequence of inaccurate results. The startup claims its AI model improves through regular updates.
Founder: Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar
Total funding raised: 41 million US dollars
Important investors: Lightspeed Venture Partners, Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures
Sarvam AI (Telugu for “every thing”) is India’s other high-profile startup working on LLMs based on Indian languages. The startup was co-founded by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, each of whom had previously worked with tech veteran Nandan Nilekani on IIT Madras’ AI4Bharat project. The Bengaluru-based startup emerged from obscurity in December and goals to supply full-stack generative AI offerings, including a platform that lets enterprises develop GenAI apps based on Sarvam’s LLM and contribute to open-source models and datasets. In February, Sarvam AI Partnership with Microsoft to launch voice-based AI tools and convey its LLM for Indian voices to Azure.
Founder: Ashwini Asokan and Anand Chandrasekaran
Total funding raised: 57.4 million US dollars
Important investors: Avatar Growth Capital, Sequoia Capital and Alpha Wave Global
Computer vision startup Mad Street Den develops AI solutions for enterprise clients. Co-founded in 2016 by neuroscientist-designer duo Ashwini Asokan and Anand Chandrasekaran, the Chennai-based startup initially launched its vision technology for retail but expanded it to vertical markets reminiscent of finance, insurance, healthcare and logistics. Its larger vision goes beyond its home market, with its mission to “make people around the globe AI natives.”
Founder: Jo Aggarwal and Ramakant Vempati
Total funding raised: 25 million US dollars
Important investors: HealthQuad, W Health, British International Investment and Google Assistant Fund
Wysa is a mental health technology startup that uses AI to supply an “emotionally intelligent” therapist chatbot to assist users discuss their feelings. The chatbot is managed by Wysa's mental health experts and is utilized by over 6.5 million people in greater than 95 countries and across age groups. The Bengaluru-based startup, which also has operations in Boston and London, raised $20 million in July 2022. It was co-founded in 2016 by Jo Aggarwal and her husband Ramakant Vempati after Aggarwal fell right into a severe depression.
Founder: Sharad Sanghi and Anindya Das
Total funding raised: 20 million US dollars
Important investors: Matrix Partners India, Nexus Venture Partners and NTTVC
Mumbai-based Neysa Networks is led by veteran tech entrepreneur Sharad Sanghi, who previously founded cloud and data company Netmagic Solutions. It offers enterprises a wide range of generative AI platforms and services to assist them deploy AI and machine learning. The startup's Nebula platform is used to scale AI projects using on-demand GPU infrastructure and train and infer AI models within the cloud. The company's Palvera platform offers multi-vendor and multi-input observability and enables users to preemptively discover issues using a unified data lake and pre-existing telemetry datasets. The Aegis platform focuses on AI/ML security.
Here are some emerging Indian AI startups to regulate
Founder: Mahek Mody and Mohit Sharma
Total funding raised: 5.5 million US dollars
Important investors: Khosla Ventures and Draper Associates
Upliance AI is bringing AI into home appliances to assist people cook over 500 recent dishes at home. The Bengaluru-based startup plans to lift $10-15 million early next yr to strengthen its market presence.
Founder: Venkata Pingali and Indrayudh Ghoshal
Total funding raised: 2.3 million US dollars
Most vital investor: Blume Ventures
Scribble Data provides domain-specific AI assistants to major North American and European insurers to assist them scale their back-end business capabilities. The company is headquartered in Bengaluru with a sales team in Toronto.
Founder: Kanishk Shukla and Akshay Gugnani
Total funding raised: 1.3 million US dollars
Important investors: Chiratae Ventures, Endiya Partners and Entrepreneur First
Bengaluru-based Expertia AI helps corporations automate their recruitment using AI and reduces the time to rent to 24 hours. It automates sourcing, screening, outreach, engagement, assessment, interviewing and scheduling using proprietary deep learning algorithms. The startup is currently raising $3 million from the lead investor, with participation from existing investors.
Founder: Anuj Srivastava and Priyesh Srivastava
Total funding raised: 1.1 million US dollars
Important investors: Silverneedle Ventures, Indian Angel Network and LetsVenture
Bengaluru-based OnFinance supports banks and asset management firms with its AI co-pilots working in areas starting from equity evaluation to compliance to wealth advisory.
Founder: Shray Arora and Sidharth Sahni
Total funding raised: 550,000 US dollars
Most vital investor: Peacock Ventures
Delhi-based Helium helps e-commerce brands construct direct-to-consumer web stores with AI and reactive headless storefronts.
Founder: Abhishek Upperwal
Total funding raised: 140,000 US dollars
Bengaluru and Gurugram-based Soket Labs is an AI research company that has developed the open-source multi-language LLM Pragna-1B through its in-house GenAI Studio. It plans to lift $7 million in a seed round in two to a few months.
Founder: Pratik Desai
Based in Surat with an expanded office within the Bay Area, KissanAI serves agriculture and allied sectors using its GenAI platform AgriCopilot and a family of subject-specific agri-LLMs, Dhenu. The startup is currently self-funded and supported by the founder's family and friends, but plans to lift $3-4 million in a Seed to Series A round.
Founder: Pawan Prabhat and Paramdeep Singh
Gurugram-based Shorthills AI was founded in June 2018 by Pawan Prabhat and Paramdeep Singh. The pair had previously founded accounting training platform EduPristine. The bootstrapped startup develops bespoke AI tools for enterprises and counts NHS and PwC amongst its first 12 clients within the US and India.
