A year-old startup called Emergent has become the second Indian AI company in a month to cross the billion-dollar valuation mark, raising $300 million in a Series C round that values the firm at $1.5 billion. The company, which targets non-technical entrepreneurs and small business owners, says 70% of its users had no prior coding experience. About 12 million apps were built on its platform in the last year, according to the company. The round was led by Bengaluru-based Creaegis, with participation from Claypond, Sentinel Global, and existing backers including Khosla Ventures, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Lightspeed, and Y Combinator.
Exactly one month earlier, India's full-stack sovereign AI company Sarvam raised $234 million at a $1.5 billion post-money valuation. These back-to-back unicorns signal a shift in India's AI trajectory. Deepika Giri, head of AI research at IDC Asia Pacific, told CNBC that nearly half of Indian enterprises are already testing agentic AI solutions, calling it unusually fast experimentation for a market this size. IDC expects 45% of Indian organizations to adopt specialized cloud services by 2026, easing a key compute bottleneck. India also boasts the broadest AI accelerator stack in the Asia-Pacific region, spanning NVIDIA, AMD, and hyperscaler chips, giving it flexibility most markets lack.
Experts caution these are early days. India still doesn't produce cutting-edge chips domestically, lacks a frontier-scale foundation model on par with U.S. or Chinese leaders, and trails in data center capacity. But a vast engineering talent pool and strength in IT services could help the country build applications on top of foreign models. At the global AI summit in February, Prime Minister Modi said his vision is for India to be among the top three AI superpowers globally. Counterpoint Research's Neil Shah told CNBC it will take at least three to four years for India's AI ecosystem to create a flywheel effect. Still, as S&P Global's Mohammad Hassan noted, Emergent's fundraise highlights technology talent as India's potential trump card in the long run.
Source: CNBC