Pranav Balakrishnan · · 8 min readThe view from inside India’s AI boom
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For anyone arriving in Bengaluru hoping to understand its AI scene, the sheer number of events can be dizzying.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Wispr Flow have opened, or are preparing to open, offices here. Launches, hackathons, and mixers seem to fill the calendar every other day.
The interest is easy to understand. Bengaluru is home to more than one million tech workers, including a vast pool of coders and enthusiastic AI users. As one AI lab executive told me, few places outside China combine India’s enormous scale with such a dense concentration of technology talent in a single city.
Yet all this activity can obscure a more uncomfortable reality: Big Tech still largely sees India as a market to sell to rather than a place where the next generation of leading AI companies will be built.
While Indian VCs enthusiastically talk up the country’s AI opportunity online, they often sound far less convinced in private. “All the action is happening in the US,” one investor told me. Some Indian funds have even opened Bay Area offices.
Startups face the same contradiction. Many present themselves as US-headquartered even when their engineering and operations teams are nearly all in Bengaluru.
The reason is not merely access to customers. “Being seen as an Indian-headquartered company does not help with optics when it comes to fundraising,” said one consumer-tech founder who pivoted into AI.
Image credit: Made by Ulla/Tech in Asia with the help of AI
Our job at Tech in Asia is to look past the crowded event calendars and sweeping claims to separate activity from progress and optics from substance. That is the reporting your subscriptions make possible.
Two months into the job, I’m still excited every day to be covering the fastest-moving beat in technology. If you have a story tip, email me at pranav.balakhrisnan@techinasia.com.
Pranav Balakrishnan, AI reporter
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