Samreen Ahmad · · 5 min readInside India’s AI wearables push
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In focus
- Inside India’s AI wearables race
- BukuWarung co-founder’s new AI startup
- SEA cleantech players worth watching
Hello reader,
All’s well that ends well.
Last month’s AI Impact Summit in India grabbed headlines for its scale, with companies like Reliance and Adani announcing more than US$200 billion in AI investments.
But for one startup founder, the event made a very different kind of headline.
Dhananjay Yadav, co-founder of AI wearables startup NeoSapien, was there to showcase “India’s first patented AI wearable.”
Around noon on February 16, security personnel began clearing the exhibition area ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit, which had been scheduled for 2 p.m. that day. According to Yadav, exhibitors were told to quickly vacate the space and assured that their devices would remain safe.
Following the instructions, he left the booth and the boxes of wearables behind. When the gates reopened hours later, though, the devices were already gone.
“We paid for flights, accommodation, logistics, and even the booth,” Yadav later wrote in a post on X. “Only to see our wearables disappear inside a high-security zone.”
The devices were eventually recovered, but the incident delayed my plan to do a hands-on trial of NeoSapien product. It also, somewhat unexpectedly, drew wider attention to the device and the emerging wave of AI wearables coming out of India.
In today’s top story, I take a closer look at the Indian startups building these devices and the competition they face from global players like Meta. It’s a buzzing space, so it’s safe to bet that soon enough, AI will no longer just remain on the screen – it will also hang around the neck, frame the eyes, or even rest on the temple.
Meanwhile, BukuWarung co-founder Chinmay Chauhan has returned with a new AI startup backed by a16z Speedrun. Acceler8 wants to offer real-time data that can be used for workforce decisions.
Across hardware and software alike, founders are racing to figure out where AI will actually stick.
Samreen Ahmad, journalist
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