India’s rapidly growing developer community a key investment area with huge potential, says Microsoft’s Jay Parikh

Jay Parikh, Executive Vice President, Core AI, Microsoft (L) and Kyle Daigle, COO, GitHub (R)

India's developer community is expanding rapidly and remains a key area of investment for Microsoft, presenting 'huge potential' and an 'exciting space' to learn from, a top company executive told Moneycontrol in an interview.

"We have a huge Microsoft presence in India. A lot of the AI (Artificial Intelligence) technologies is developed in our IDC (India Development Center) team. We also have a lot of customers there, including the big systems and consulting firms, all of whom are major customers of both GitHub and Microsoft," said Jay Parikh, Executive Vice President, CoreAI, Microsoft, on the sidelines of GitHub's annual conference, Universe, held in San Francisco.

Parikh, who joined Microsoft’s senior leadership team in October 2024, currently oversees CoreAI, an engineering division established earlier this year to build the end-to-end Copilot and AI stack that enables the firm’s first-party and third-party customers to build and run AI applications and agents.

The division brings together developer platform GitHub, the company's Developer Division (Dev Div), AI Platform, and select teams from the Office of the CTO, including AI Supercomputer, AI Agentic Runtimes, and Engineering Thrive.

At Universe 2025, GitHub announced that India now has the world’s largest open-source contributor base, surpassing the United States. The country ranks second globally in overall open-source contributions, AI repository contributions, and GitHub Education users.

India is also GitHub's fastest-growing developer community and its second-largest market, with 21.9 million developers. The company expects this number to rise to more than 57.5 million by 2030, making India the largest developer community in the world.

Parikh said GitHub is investing significant efforts in community building and learning initiatives including accelerating open-source projects and contributions, supporting contributors, advancing education, and working with schools, startups, and companies to train and share how to use these tools.

"GitHub's ethos is open source and that's going to be a continued focus, especially with the amount of contributors and projects that are happening in India," he said.

Microsoft also offers a range of programmes for AI-native companies to collaborate with GitHub and other parts of the software giant's ecosystem including the corporate venture capital fund M12 that invests in early-stage enterprise software startups, Parikh said.

Read: GitHub COO Kyle Daigle on 'vibe coding' and why one should still learn to code in the AI era

From students to universities and companies

GitHub COO Kyle Daigle told Moneycontrol that the company is pursuing a broad approach to further drive adoption of its developer platform in India.

“First and foremost, we start with students. They need to have access to the best tools. They should be able to use GitHub Copilot and all of GitHub and learn that early on while they’re still in school or before university,” he said.

The platform has partnered with communities such as Hack Club, which is run by teenagers and helps high school students learn coding and build projects as part of these initiatives.

"We partner with universities across the board and also look at how universities can partner with us to work with various IT services companies in India that are using GitHub Copilot. That way, we can create a through line from students to where they’ll be employed, with ongoing support from GitHub," Daigle told Moneycontrol.

GitHub hosts hackathons with customers such as Infosys in India, where employees and students participate together. In June 2024, the company had announced a partnership with Infosys to launch its first GitHub Center of Excellence, aimed at speeding up the process of software production.

"What’s been so interesting to me is the speed at which IT services companies in India have realised the opportunity that AI is providing their developers, and how quickly they’re putting that into action," Daigle said.

“They’ve realised that, similar to us, you need to empower developers to use and understand the technology to get the most value out of these tools, rather than just bringing the tools to them and expecting they’ll magically start using them,” he added.

In some of these cases, tens of thousands of developers are using GitHub and GitHub Copilot to drive their businesses forward, Daigle noted.

Increased support for startups

GitHub is also expanding support through its Startup Programme to connect startups with mentorship from its employees and the open-source community.

"We have our Secure Open Source Fund and other opportunities where startups can get started in India and stay in India to launch their products. They’re more than welcome to go wherever they need to, but there’s something special about ensuring that you can build where you want to build, where you live, where you grew up, and still have the support of a global company like GitHub” he said.

The company had introduced a free tier of its code completion tool, GitHub Copilot, for developers in December 2024. It also continues to offer students free access to a wide range of premium developer tools and software through the GitHub Student Developer Pack.

"It's important for developers to have access to Copilot, and that's why we keep bringing a free version of almost everything. I do think that’s a factor in how quickly India is able to adopt some of these AI tools," Daigle said.

"In some ways, we’re still kind of learning, but we clearly know that the thing we’ve done for 18 years, build it and give it to open source for free in public repos, continues to be something that empowers developers," he added.

At Universe 2025, GitHub also unveiled Agent HQ, an open ecosystem where AI agents can coexist and collaborate on a single platform.

In the coming months, coding agents from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Cognition, xAI, and others will become available directly within GitHub, accessible to developers through a paid GitHub Copilot subscription.