A Crazy Week for Indian GenAI Startups

As per AIM Research, in the past six months alone, over 43 Indian AI startups received close to $864 million in funding. Bhavish Aggarwal’s Ola Krutrim leads the pack at $50 million, followed by Sarvam AI and Ema, which have raised $41 million and $36 million in Series A funding, respectively.?

And it’s only going north in the coming months.?

A few days ago, Sybill, a startup founded by Indian techies Gorish Aggarwal and Nishit Asnani, raised $11 million in Series A funding from Greycroft to enhance their AI sales assistant and expand their team.?

Meanwhile, Bengaluru-based generative AI startup Simplismart, founded by Amritanshu Jain and Devansh Ghatak, raised $7 million in a funding round led by Accel, with participation from existing investors, including Anicut Capital, First Cheque, Sunn91 and Shastra VC.?

Gnani.ai, a voice-based generative AI startup founded by Ganesh Gopalan and Ananth Nagaraj, raised $4 million in Series A funding from Info Edge Ventures to support sales growth and geographic expansion.

Meanwhile, Rabbitt AI, founded by Harneet Singh, raised $2.1 million in seed funding from TC Group, alongside participation from NVIDIA, Meta, and Microsoft execs to enhance their generative AI platform and expand their team.

The list goes on. Devnagri, a Noida-based generative AI company co-founded by Nakul Kundra and Himanshu Sharma, raised an undisclosed amount in a Pre-Series A round led by Inflection Point Ventures to enhance marketing, sales, technology, R&D, infrastructure, and administrative functions.

Bengaluru-based AI startup rampp.ai, founded by Ajay Agrawal and Huzefa Saifee, raised $500,000 in angel funding to enhance its RADI Navigator Platform, which provides contextual and customised insights for enterprise strategy.

Bengaluru-based ToyStack.ai raised $325,000 in pre-seed funding led by angel investors D Devaraj and Asit Shetty to further develop their automated deployment tool, expand their team, and enhance sales and marketing efforts.

There’s more: Bengaluru-based space tech startup GalaxEye, founded by members of team Avishkar Hyperloop, raised $6.5 million in a funding round led by Mela Ventures and Speciale Invest to launch their first satellite, the ‘Drishti Mission’, and further develop multi-sensor payload technology.

Bloq Quantum, an AI quantum software startup founded by Sreekuttan L S and Jay Patel, raised INR 1.3 crore in a pre-seed round led by Inflection Point Ventures to accelerate enterprise adoption of quantum computing.

In focus: Reliance Jio-backed TWO seems to be in a different league altogether. The company is redefining human-AI interaction with SUTRA, a multilingual and cost-efficient GenAI engine, powering products like ZAPPY, Geniya, and ChatSUTRA to bring AI to billions in over 50 languages.

So far, TWO has raised over $20 million in seed funding from Jio Platforms and South Korean internet conglomerate Naver.?

Less is more: Indian AI startups are known for their frugal jugaad power. For instance, TWO, which recently launched ChatSUTRA and Geniya, alternatives to ChatGPT and Perplexity AI, has raised $20 million. In comparison, OpenAI and Perplexity AI have raised $13 billion and $165 million, respectively.?

The same goes for Beatoven.ai, which recently raised $1.3 million in its pre-series A, led by Entrepreneur First and Capital 2B, bringing its total funding to $2.42 million. Meanwhile, its competitors, Udio and Suno AI have raised $10 million and $125 million, respectively.?

AI acquisitions: Protect AI acquired Bengaluru-based SydeLabs for $25 million to enhance LLM security.?

C5i acquired Bengaluru-based Analytic Edge for $20 million, marking its second Indian acquisition after Incivus, to enhance AI-driven marketing and sales solutions, as the firm aims for a INR 1000 crore turnover and a future listing in India.

OpenAI recently acquired Rockset, a data analytics company co-founded by former Meta engineers Dhruba Borthakur and Venkat Venkataramani, for $105 million to enhance GPT-6's retrieval infrastructure, integrating Rockset's advanced real-time indexing and analytics capabilities to improve data processing and reduce AI model hallucinations.

AI breakthroughs: MeitY-backed startup Netrasemi is all set to tape out a 12 nm AI chip this year in a bid to revolutionise edge AI with cost-effective, power-efficient chipsets, positioning India as a key player in the global AI hardware market.

Bengaluru-based AI startup Unscript, which has raised over $1.25 million in funding, outshines competitors like Google Vlogger and OpenAI’s Sora by creating studio-quality videos from photos in under two minutes.?

Swiggy recently unveiled Hermes, an in-house text-to-SQL AI tool, enabling faster and smarter food deliveries by allowing teams to generate and execute SQL queries via natural language prompts in Slack.?

FireCompass, a SaaS startup with a presence in Bengaluru, recently launched Agent AI for ethical hacking, enhancing its platform with generative AI-powered autonomous penetration testing to significantly improve testing coverage, productivity, and cybersecurity threat mitigation.

Bengaluru startup Control One, backed by $350k in funding from industry leaders and NVIDIA Inception Partner support, recently introduced India's first physical AI agent in a forklift, revolutionising warehouse operations with voice-controlled, autonomous material handling.?

Kuku FM, backed by Google and Nandan Nilekani’s Fundamentum Partnership, told AIM that it uses generative AI to transform storytelling by enabling 5,000 creators to become full-stack producers.?

Personate AI, the Delhi-based bootstrapped startup behind AI anchors Krish and Bhoomi for Doordarshan and Sana for Aaj Tak, is leveraging large vision models (LVMs) for pixel generation, similar to OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Imagen, and text-to-speech models to create ultra-realistic virtual anchors. The company, co-founded by Rishab Sharma and Akshay Sharma, is transforming content delivery for over 25 enterprise customers.

AI partnerships: CoRover.ai recently partnered with AI auditing firm EthosAI.one to benchmark BharatGPT against industry leaders like GPT-4, Llama 2, and Gemini, ensuring reliability, fairness, and accuracy through continuous auditing and enhancements.?

Karya partnered with Microsoft Research to build one of the largest multilingual evaluations of Indian LLMs, involving over 90,000 human assessments of 30 models in 10 languages to address linguistic diversity and cultural nuances, alongside enhancing model performance and reliability.

Former Tech Mahindra chief CP Gurnani and InterGlobe (IndiGo) group managing director, Rahul Bhatia’s AI startup, AIonOS, recently partnered with Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison to launch the AI3 initiative, aiming to transform Indonesia into an AI-driven economy by introducing advanced AI-led solutions across various industries.

Outliers: Mukund Jha, the co-founder and former CTO of Dunzo, is in discussions to secure INR 80 crore (approximately $6-10 million) from Together Fund for his new generative AI startup focused on automating quality assurance processes in businesses, integrating AI and SaaS technologies.

Meanwhile, the Telangana state government has become the first in India to build AI models in a regional language. It has partnered with Swecha to develop a Telugu LLM, involving 1 lakh students in a datathon to collect high-quality data. It aims to showcase the model at the Global AI Summit in September.

Now is the best time to build an AI startup in India: Antler recently announced a $10 million investment in early-stage Indian startups.

Meanwhile, Google and MeitY Startup Hub is looking to train 10,000 Indian startups in AI, offering mentorship, AI-focused programs, and up to $350,000 in cloud credits. It also announced the 2024 class of its AI First Accelerator program featuring 20 AI-driven startups.?

JioGenNext's latest cohort, MAP’24, also featured 10 generative AI startups across sectors like healthcare, banking, legal services, and agriculture.

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AI Nuggets >>?

• NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang is said to visit India for the AI Summit 2024 in Mumbai from October 23-25, highlighting their partnerships and advancements in AI infrastructure, including the introduction of the B100 chip and support for India's AI startup ecosystem.
• OpenAI-backed startup Figure teases its new humanoid robot, Figure 02, set to debut on August 6, 2024, aiming to revolutionise workplaces with advanced AI-driven capabilities, supported by major investors including NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Bezos Expeditions.
• Midjourney released Version 6.1 of its image model, featuring more coherent images, enhanced textures, improved text accuracy, and faster processing, along with a new personalisation model, set to become the default for all users.
• GitHub launched GitHub Models, enabling over 100 million developers to become AI engineers by providing access to leading AI models, an interactive playground for experimentation, and seamless integration with Codespaces and Azure for production deployment.
• Google launched Gemma 2 2B, a 2 billion parameter model offering best-in-class performance across diverse hardware, advanced safety classifiers, and research tools, outperforming GPT-3.5 on the Chatbot Arena leaderboard and optimised for efficient deployment in various environments.
• Google recently hired Character.AI co-founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, alongside licensing its models, and integrating 30 employees into its Gemini AI efforts, while Character.AI shifts to open-source models and seeks a new CEO.
• Canva acquired generative AI company Leonardo.Ai to enhance its AI design capabilities, integrating Leonardo's advanced AI models and team of 120 experts to accelerate innovation and empower 190 million users with cutting-edge visual communication tools.
• Meta released Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2), a unified segmentation model for precise object selection in images and videos, featuring robust zero-shot performance, real-time interactivity, and advanced video processing capabilities.