Prosus bets on India's next startup wave—everyday AI

Prosus recently invested in two Indian AI startups geared towards the application layer: Arivihan and CodeKarma

- Rwit Ghosh

Dutch investing giant Prosus NV's venture capital arm is training its sights in India on a specific kind of artificial intelligence (AI) startup—those developing user-facing AI tools and services.

In its latest annual report, Prosus said the next wave of value from AI would come from the application layer, "where AI is embedded into business workflows." In other words: AI-first startups.

Prosus recently invested in two Indian AI startups geared towards the application layer: Arivihan, an AI-driven learning platform, and CodeKarma, a productivity tool for software developers.

"I think the Indian market is very large. There are over 200 million annual shoppers and 500 million people have access to the internet. A playground at that scale isn't available anywhere else in the world," Dhruv Gupta, investor at Prosus, told Mint in an interview.

Prosus led Arivihan's $4.2 million pre-Series A fundraising round alongside Accel and GSF Ventures in July—its first edtech investment in India since it wrote off its $530 million investment in Byju's in June last year.