India's super-rich pooling millions for a slice of world's hottest private AI firms

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Bengaluru: India’s artificial intelligence (AI) startups may be drawing growing attention, but some of the country’s richest family offices and ultra-high-net-worth individuals (UHNIs) are placing their biggest bets thousands of miles away—on US-based ‘frontier AI’ and large language model (LLM) building firms that they believe could define the next computing cycle.

Industry insiders, wealth managers and family offices Mint spoke with say a familiar set of companies sit at the heart of these offshore bets: OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, xAI (maker of Grok), SpaceX and FigureAI. The pattern, they add, is that these are largely unlisted and tightly held firms, which makes it difficult for investors to get in with smaller cheques.

So, to get an entry, investors are increasingly relying on wealth managers and private banks to stitch together pooled offshore vehicles and secondary-market access, rather than trying to land directly on these companies’ cap tables. This approach helps them operate within India’s overseas investment and remittance framework, while accessing private firms that typically do not accept direct individual shareholders.

Bankers and advisors at firms such as Kotak Mahindra Bank and InCred Wealth say interest has picked up as wealthy Indians diversify offshore, and as global AI valuations have jumped, bringing India-resident UHNIs, family offices and some non-resident Indians into the same deal flow. The deal structure is driven less by demand, and more by access.

“No SpaceX or a company like SpaceX will take a single individual investor on its cap table without a work around," said Gautami Gavankar, president at Kotak Mahindra Bank. “So most investments into private