Artificial Intelligence
Ten Indian AI startups will spend four months in Paris, plugged into Europe's most prestigious startup ecosystem through a landmark collaboration between IndiaAI, Station F, and HEC Paris. We examine what this program means for the founders going, for the companies they will build, and for the future of Global Indian AI.
Shaym Kumar
Author
The Bengaluru-based AI startup is close to raising $300–350 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, positioning itself as India's sovereign answer to the global AI race. We examine the case for Indian AI — and why it goes far deeper than national pride.
Excerpt: In March 2026, Google AI Futures Fund cofounder Jonathan Silber declared that the next unicorn in generative AI would emerge from India. Weeks later, two Indian startups — Sarvam AI and Emergent — were in talks to raise $250 million rounds at unicorn valuations. Neysa had already become India's second unicorn of 2026. The land of IT services is now the land of foundation models.
— On the morning of May 28, two days ago, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology released a 217‑page draft of legislation that will, if enacted, fundamentally reshape the relationship between artificial intelligence and the Indian state. The Artificial Intelligence (Regulation and Governance) Act, 2026—the "AI Act," as it is already being called—is the most ambitious regulatory intervention in the technology sector that any democratic government has attempted. It proposes to ban certain categories of AI‑generated content, including non‑consensual deepfake pornography and AI‑generated child sexual abuse material. It mandates that all AI‑generated or AI‑assisted content—images, videos, audio, text—that is published or distributed in India be watermarked or labelled in a way that identifies its synthetic origin. It creates a new statutory authority, the Artificial Intelligence Regulatory Authority of India, with the power to license, audit, and sanction the developers and deployers of high‑risk AI systems. And it imposes criminal penalties—including imprisonment—for the most serious violations of its provisions.
From a $9 billion market in 2025 to a projected $102 billion by 2035, India's software industry is no longer just the world's back office — it's building the world's software.
On a Monday morning three weeks ago, a junior artist named Rajesh Kumar arrived at a film set in Film City for a day's work as a background extra. He was one of 200 extras hired for a crowd sequence in a major Bollywood production. When he reached the holding area, he found 50 of his colleagues—not the 200 he had expected. The remaining 150 faces that would populate the crowd had been generated by an AI model, trained on a library of licensed images, and composited into the scene in post‑production. The extras who had been hired were not there to be filmed. They were there to provide motion‑capture data—to walk, to gesture, to react—so that the AI could map their movements onto the generated faces. The film's budget for background extras had been reduced by 75 percent.
Kyra is 22 years old. She has 2.7 million followers on Instagram, a further 1.2 million on YouTube, and an engagement rate that consistently outperforms her human peers by a factor of three. She posts from a sun‑drenched apartment in Bandra that does not exist, wears clothes from a walk‑in wardrobe that was never constructed, and shares life updates—breakups, travels, new hobbies—that never happened. In February 2026, she signed an exclusive brand‑ambassador deal with a major Indian skincare company for ₹1.2 crore. The company’s marketing head, when asked whether it mattered that Kyra is entirely computer‑generated, replied with a question of his own: “She’s never late to a shoot, never gets into a controversy, and her engagement rate is triple our last human ambassador’s. Why would we go back?”
On Wednesday morning, a 12-year-old fintech company announced a funding round and triggered an identity crisis across the entire American banking industry. Mercury, the technology company that provides financial-operating systems to startups, disclosed a $200 million Series D funding round that valued the firm at $5.2 billion, led by investment firm TCV with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, CRV, Sapphire Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Spark Capital. The valuation represented a 48.6 percent increase from the $3.5 billion figure attached to its Series C in March 2025. Total primary and secondary funding has now reached approximately $700 million.
James Zou had run out of time. The Stanford professor of biomedical data science runs a physical lab filled with brilliant graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, and yet, like every academic scientist, he was haunted by the gap between what his team could theoretically accomplish and what they could actually do in the finite hours of a working day. The problem was not intelligence. It was bandwidth. There were always more promising targets than there were people to investigate them, always more experiments worth running than hours in which to run them.