India's AI Scene Heats Up as Second Startup Hits Billion-Dollar Mark in a Month

A year-old startup called Emergent has become the second Indian artificial intelligence company in under a month to cross the billion-dollar valuation threshold, signaling that the country is beginning to make serious moves in the global AI race. The company, which focuses on letting people build apps without writing code, announced Wednesday that it raised $300 million in Series C funding at a $1.5 billion valuation.

Bengaluru-based investment firm Creaegis led the round, with participation from Indian family office Claypond and California's Sentinel Global. Existing backers Khosla Ventures, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Lightspeed, and Y Combinator also joined. Emergent's co-founder and CEO Mukund Jha said the platform was built for non-technical entrepreneurs and small business owners, noting that 70% of its users had no prior coding experience. In the past year, users built roughly 12 million apps on the platform.

This news comes exactly one month after Sarvam, a full-stack sovereign AI company, also hit a $1.5 billion valuation. Analysts say these milestones reflect a broader shift. Deepika Giri, head of AI research at IDC Asia Pacific, told CNBC that nearly half of Indian enterprises are already testing agentic AI solutions, calling it unusually fast experimentation for a market this size. IDC expects 45% of Indian organizations to adopt specialized cloud services by 2026, easing a key bottleneck for AI training. Experts also point to India's vast engineering talent and its broad AI accelerator stack - covering NVIDIA, AMD, and hyperscaler chips - as advantages that could help the country shed its reputation as an AI laggard. Still, they caution that India trails in cutting-edge chip production, frontier foundation models, and data center capacity. With the government aiming to make India a top-three AI superpower, the next few years will be critical.

Source: CNBC