Prosus scales up India AI play amid global headwinds

Even as some sectors feel the heat of global economic headwinds, Dutch technology investor Prosus is accelerating its artificial intelligence (AI) investments in India, betting on a new wave of AI-powered startups that it expects will drive the next phase of growth in one of the world's largest digital markets.

- PEERZADA ABRAR

The Netherlands-based firm, which has invested nearly $9 billion over the years in India across companies like food-delivery giant Swiggy and e-commerce platform Meesho, has made three AI investments in four months — including education platform Arivihan and developer tool Code Karma — as it positions AI as a "central pillar" of its Indian strategy.

"What we are noticing on the ground is an entirely different wave of technology dissipating, and that is sort of immune to macroeconomic cycles. This is very similar to how mobile or Cloud computing dissipated across the economy," Dhruv Gupta, Investor, Prosus India told Business Standard. "We are speaking to AI companies almost every day, and these are across B2B (business-to-business), B2C (business-to-consumer), consumer, SaaS, etc."

The investment spree began in May with Deccan AI, a startup that provides high-quality data for AI model training and evaluations supporting companies like Google and Snowflake through a 500,000-plus freelancer network. In July, Prosus backed Arivihan, an AI-driven tutoring platform from Indore, offering affordable coaching for school students, with a focus on tier-II and tier-III cities.

The investment firm led the $4.2 million pre-Series A round alongside Accel. Most recently, CodeKarma, a Bengaluru-based developer-productivity tool, raised $2.5 million in a pre-seed round from Prosus and Accel.