Over 250 Indian AI startups emerged during last 18 months, says Accel’s Prashanth Prakash

L-R - Moneycontrol's Chandra R Srikanth, Meity Abhishek Singh and Accel's Prashanth Prakash

India has seen the emergence of over 250 artificial intelligence (AI) startups in the last 18 months, according to Prashanth Prakash, Partner at Accel, a venture capital firm.

In the fireside chat with Moneycontrol’s Chandra R Srikanth at the Accel AI Summit on June 4 in Bengaluru, Prakash and Abhishek Singh, Additional Secretary at the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) discussed India’s agenda for staying globally competitive in the AI race.

Prakash said the AI startup ecosystem in India is growing rapidly, but the real unlock lies ahead through voice-first interfaces, scalable infrastructure, and a skilled talent base.

Prakash as well as MeitY’s Additional Secretary emphasised that India’s advantage in engineering talent must be complemented by deep investments in research and development, high-quality datasets, and access to scalable compute infrastructure.

“Voice will be the most natural interface for the next billion users,” Prakash said, highlighting the importance of building AI solutions that can understand and process multiple Indian languages to drive broader adoption.

During the discussion, Abhishek Singh, Additional Secretary at MeitY confirmed that IT companies Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) are investing in Graphics Processing Units (GPUs).

“Given the capability that our Indian IT industry has, and given from what we are hearing about Infosys investing into GPUs, TCS investing into this, they are taking a large-scale training of their team members,” Singh said at the Accel AI Summit.

He added that there is a need for enhancing their capabilities, and he expects cash-heavy IT players to come up with AI products, applications, and use cases in various sectors.