Indian startups secure $364M in a week as AI and spacetech deals surge

This weekly funding snapshot is another sign that India’s startup ecosystem is not just surviving the global AI capital cycle—it’s leaning into it. A $180 million late-stage infusion into MoEngage, coupled with sizable checks for spacetech and deep-tech firms like Digantara, indicates that investors see durable demand for data- and AI-heavy platforms built in India but serving global markets. While many of these companies are application-layer rather than frontier-model players, they still drive real workloads onto GPUs and cloud AI services, indirectly reinforcing the economics of large-scale model development.

Strategically, the mix of sectors—AI-enabled customer engagement, space situational awareness, EVs, SaaS—reflects how generative and predictive AI are seeping into infrastructure plays, not just consumer chatbots. Over the next few years, some of these firms could become important data and distribution partners for frontier labs looking to localize models for India’s languages, regulations, and consumer behavior. At minimum, they enlarge the pool of engineering talent comfortable deploying and fine-tuning advanced models in production.

For the AGI race, the takeaway is that the center of gravity for AI deployment is not confined to Silicon Valley and a handful of Chinese giants. India’s capital markets and late-stage investors are clearly willing to back AI-heavy companies at scale, which will matter when the next wave of more capable models needs diverse, real-world environments to prove out their value.