India is becoming the nucleus of startups in the world, with 40 Indian startups entering the unicorn club in 2021, despite setbacks the world has witnessed due to the pandemic. With an increasing number of young people opting for the startup route, IITs across the country have increased their mentorship capacity to assist these young people in realising their entrepreneurial goals.  

Behind IIT’s backing for AI startups 

IITs are at the forefront in translating ideas from academic research to bring practical solutions for government and industry as well. The strong industry-academia collaboration is the need of the hour as India's Artificial Intelligence (AI) market is predicted to reach $7.8 billion by 2025, rising at a CAGR of 20.2 per cent, according to an International Data Corporation (IDC) report. To encash such huge potential, the startup ecosystem needs assistance and IIT’s strong scientific expertise is a bonus.  

Moreover, as Nandan Nilekani, the man behind Aadhar architecture rightly says that on the government and business fronts, India is well-positioned to use AI in novel ways to address problems and tap into opportunities, at the discussions organised on the sidelines of the one-year anniversary of INDIAai.  

Further to that, we have certain limitations across sectors such as agriculture, health, climate, urban governance and logistics, having said that, India is blessed with a powerful combination of available data, demand, talent and supply of services. The ground seems fertile to adopt deep-tech solutions to overcome challenges and let technology play on top of the India scale to improve services, quality of delivery and decision making. 

Here are some of the IIT-incubated AI startups that are making waves in the market with the potential to scale higher in the years to come: 

• IIT-Madras incubated Uniphore is a global conversational AI platform with headquarters in Chennai and Palo Alto, CA. The startup combines conversational AI, workflow automation, and RPA (Robotic Process Automation) with a business user-friendly-UX in a single integrated platform to transform and democratise customer experiences across industries. Uniphore has recently joined Cisco Solutions Plus, an industry-leading partner program that helps enterprise buyers design and implement complete end-to-end customer solutions.   
• IIT-Guwahati incubated startup AgSpert is an Agri-Tech startup and has developed AgSpeak - a multi-lingual smartphone app for farmers. The application was created with the purpose of improving in-farm productivity with Artificial Intelligence (AI), would assist farmers in making decisions and managing farm activities with a single click of a button on their smartphone or computer. The very purpose of the startup is to serve the North-Eastern India with agriculture as the major economic activity. 
• IIT-Kharagpur incubated Capillary Technologies, currently headquartered in Singapore is a B2B SaaS platform. The platform integrates artificial intelligence and machine learning to make it easy for retail brands to get deep understanding and insights into their consumers, engage consumers through personalised one to one communication, provide easy and connected cross-channel commerce experience.  

IITs incubation centers nurtures technology ventures through their initial phase to establish startups, take for example, IIT Mandi back in 2016 launched IIT Mandi Catalyst as the first business incubator of Himachal Pradesh. In December 2021 itself, the institute launched the fifth edition of its annual flagship event – Himalayan Startup Trek (HST), a startup pitch competition for its students. Also, IIT-Delhi's Research & Innovation (R&I) park, one of the prominent centers for research and innovation for advanced tech platforms and deep-tech startups has been awarded with the Façade Project of the Year 2021.  

The road ahead 

India has emerged as a nation with a solid ecosystem that enables AI startup professionals and founders to kick-start their enterprises, thanks to the phenomenal expansion of the AI sector. However, India still needs to do more. The AI sector needs good and continuous investment, both in public and private sector. Rather than being risk averse, large corporations need to stand along with IITs and need to scale up their investment in R&D. Start-ups lack the financial resources to invest in AI development and face capacity constraints.  

Government has shown great interest and more push needs to be put-in for accelerating the use of AI-based solutions and promoting startups in the AI domain to solve legacy problems in agriculture, climate change and pollution. The potential of young minds and their ideas for AI startups, if used correctly and timely can set the stage for India to be leader in the AI space.