India's GenAI bet: going beyond LLMs?
AI startups in the United States received $27 billion in funding in the April-June quarter, accounting for nearly half of all startup funding in the country during that period. Funding for AI startups in India on the contrary stood at $8.2 million in the April-June quarter, declining about 91% sequentially and by 82% year on year.
Even as year-to-date in 2024, Indian AI startupshave raised nearly $96 million, which is a 61% increase over the same period in 2023, there is a reset of sorts happening in the Indian AI space. The initial euphoria is settling down and investors are looking beyond large language models (LLMs) and are now trying to zero in on companies which could build applications and services on top of LLMs.
The greatest value for Indian startups could perhaps accrue from building cost-effective applications and services since LLMs and GPU chips are highly capital-intensive, investors and executives told ET.
Nandan Nilekani, cofounder, Infosys, and founder chairman of Aadhaar, said recently that India would become the use case capital of the world for AI.
“India’s advantage is our population and their aspirations. We have to build it (solutions) at scale and innovate frugally to dramatically reduce the cost of AI,” he had said.
India currently has just one AI startup unicorn – Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal’s latest venture Krutrim AI, which is developing foundation models for Indic languages and use cases. This January, Krutrim raised $50 million in a funding round led by Matrix Partners India at a
