Startups set to make up for missed AI boom

Venture investors and startup executives are betting on services, enterprise tools in 2026

- PEERZADA ABRAR

India largely missed the first phase of artificial intelligence’s global boom — the lucrative infrastructure and model-building layer dominated by Silicon Valley giants. Now, the country’s venture investors are betting the next phase will play to local strengths.

‘The shift from Al infrastructure to applications and enterprise services could favour India’s deep engineering talent and help them manage complex service architectures, according to investors and startup executives. With nearly 50 venture-backed tech companies now publicly traded and commanding up to $150 billion in market value, India’s startup ecosystem has matured considerably. The question is whether it can translate that foundation into AI success.

“It is now a consensus view that India will see a whole host of new AI-first successes in the application and services layers — and that should start happening in the next two years,” said Nitin Sharma, partner at venture capital firm Antler India.

Ganesh Gopalan, co-founder and chief executive at deep-tech firm Gnani.ai, said 2026 will be the year AL agents move from conversation to action and become embedded in core enterprise workflows. Enterprises are demanding systems that understand context and act autonomously inside operational environments.

“As we look to 2026, this momentum accelerates. Agentic systems will become the default operating layer for customer operations, risk and service workflows,” said Gopalan. Small language models will drive higher precision and lower latency in regulated environments.

Karan Kirpalani, chief product officer at Al cloud infrastructure platform Neysa, said business leaders are no longer willing to deploy so-called ‘black box’ AImodels they cannot control or explain.