A potential scenario running in my head on how 🇮🇳 startups get a significant share in global AI over the next decade:
AI “infra” winners get built in 🇺🇸 (OpenAI, Alphabet etc.) ➡️
AI “platform” winners too, emerge in 🇺🇸 (Salesforce & HubSpot equivalents; a bunch get built/ led by the Indian diaspora) ➡️
As 1st-gen “Application” winners emerge in 🇺🇸, 🇮🇳 startups fast-follow in specific enterprise verticals & grab market share.
The time lag to fast-follow is significantly lower than, say, what Zoho did to Salesforce, or Freshdesk did to Zendesk.
This time, they play an asymmetric game. Instead of only competing with US startups on their home turf, Indian enterprise AI startups also look to dominate the Global South (SEA, MENA, LatAm, etc.).
Moving beyond binary operating models of India or US-based, Indian enterprise AI startups innovate & develop new, globally fungible, cross-geo operating models, similar to Infosys in the 90s, BPOs/ KPOs in the 2000s, and Chennai SaaS in the 2010s.
Compared to the SaaS wave, Indian enterprise AI startups get 10-100x more market share in each vertical, driven by a more ambitious & courageous founder pool, a talent base with skillsets & knowledge from previous tech waves, democratized knowledge & tools access courtesy of AI, as well as more availability of domestic risk capital at each stage.
Rather than IPO or M&A in the US, verticalized Indian enterprise AI startups either go public domestically, or get domestic Private Equity & conglomerates on the cap table who help them scale way beyond the last gen of software companies.
All these games play out on top of a favorable geo-political alignment between India & rest of the democratic world, driven by a China counter-balance narrative.
Verticalized Indian enterprise AI startups could be the contrarian venture bet of this decade!
Can Indian Vertical AI Startups Be the Contrarian Venture Bet of the Decade?
Driven by an ambitious talent pool, geopolitical tailwinds, operating model innovation & domestic risk capital, Indian vertical AI startups could be the breakout tech story of the decade.