Indian AI startups defy bubble fears with niche B2B focus

This snapshot of India’s AI startup scene is a useful corrective to the narrative that generative AI is all about a handful of US frontier labs. NDTV’s reporting shows a long tail of roughly 1,400 Indian AI startups, many of them small, B2B, and focused on localized problems in BFSI, healthcare, and automation rather than building their own large models. ([ndtvprofit.com](https://www.ndtvprofit.com/business/artificial-intelligence-ai-bubble-indian-startups-funds-b2b-companies-growth)) That structure matters: it means a lot of practical, revenue-oriented experimentation at the application layer, with models from OpenAI, Google, Meta, or local LLMs acting as infrastructure rather than the product.

From an AGI perspective, these companies aren’t trying to push the frontiers of reasoning or multimodality. But they are stress-testing how current models perform in noisy, multilingual, low-resource contexts—and feeding that experience back to both domestic and global model providers. Meanwhile, India’s IT giants are committing to massive generative AI upskilling and R&D budgets, effectively turning one of the world’s largest software workforces into a potential distribution and fine-tuning engine for future models. ([ndtvprofit.com](https://www.ndtvprofit.com/business/artificial-intelligence-ai-bubble-indian-startups-funds-b2b-companies-growth))

The competitive implication is that even if India doesn’t host many frontier models, it could become the place where those models are most deeply integrated into real-world workflows. That would give Indian firms strong leverage over where and how AGI-like capabilities are actually deployed, especially in emerging markets.