AI Startups To Watch: 5 Startups That Caught Our Eye In

What happened

On India’s 80th Independence Day, the country’s AI ambitions are entering a new phase, with startups moving beyond the race for foundation models to build the infrastructure, data and applications needed for a more self-reliant AI ecosystem This month’s cohort of five AI startups to watch includes startups across physical-world data, cinematic AI, enterprise productivity, deeptech healthcare and education, each tackling a different bottleneck in taking AI from experimentation to real-world deployment As AI funding surges in India, these five startups offer a glimpse of what the next layer of the country’s AI stack could look like, combining India-specific use cases with ambitions to build globally competitive businesses India’s AI story has grown beyond building an Indian equivalent of ChatGPT.

The current phase is about building the infrastructure, data and applications that can make AI work for India and give Indian companies an edge in markets beyond the country. The government is already doing its bit. The IndiaAI Mission, with an outlay of roughly ₹10,300 Cr, is backing around 20 indigenous sovereign AI model proposals, spanning 12 large and eight small language models.

It is also building a public dataset platform and offering subsidised access to GPUs for startups, tackling two of the biggest constraints facing India’s AI ambitions: data and compute. But the more interesting signs are emerging outside the government programme. A new generation of AI founders is moving beyond the race to build yet another general-purpose model and tackling problems that require deeper domain expertise.

Some are building the data infrastructure needed to teach machines how the physical world works. Others are developing sovereign inference platforms, AI systems that can operate across India’s many languages, and tools tailored to the quirks of Indian enterprises and consumers.

According to Inc42’s Indian Tech Startup Funding Report, H1 2026, Indian AI startups raised $676 Mn in the first six months of 2026, nearly four times the amount raised during the same period last year. The funding boom, however, is only one part of the story. The more telling signal is where founders are choosing to deploy that capital.

As India marks its 80th Independence Day, we are back with yet another edition of Inc42’s AI Startups To Watch. This edition of the AI Startups To Watch offers a glimpse into what India’s next AI layer could look like — from the data needed to train machines on the physical world and AI-powered cinematic content to enterprise productivity, deeptech healthcare and education.

These are not simply startups using AI as a feature. They are attempting to build businesses around some of the hardest problems that emerge when AI moves from the laboratory into the real world. With that thought, here are the five emerging ventures that made it to the eleventh edition of Inc42’s AI Startups To Watch. Editor’s Note: This is not a ranking.

The startups featured here are a curated selection by the Inc42 editorial team and are listed alphabetically. As AI moves from understanding language to operating in the physical world, the training data behind these systems is changing. A robot learning to navigate a kitchen or a world model trying to understand human movement cannot learn everything it needs from text and internet images.

Clairva converts real-world video into structured behavioural signals that models can use for training, fine-tuning and evaluation. Founded in 2025 by Sunil Nair, Dushyant Verma and Sabari Raju, the startup sits at the intersection of AI training data, multimodal AI and embodied AI. Its pipeline structures elements such as movement, object interaction, task sequence, gesture, speech and cultural context, combined with consent, licensing, provenance and usage-right information.

The output is a model-ready dataset whose origin, permissions and structure are known. Clairva is deliberately building deep supply in markets where AI training data remains thin: India, Southeast Asia and the wider Global South. It follows a B2B model, licensing datasets to AI labs, robotics companies and multimodal developers, and recently raised $500,000 in pre-seed funding led by Venture Catalysts. The startup is targeting a combination of markets.

Why it matters

This shift matters because India’s AI advantage may not come from building the biggest model, but from building systems around AI that are difficult to replicate — proprietary datasets, local-language capabilities, domain-specific intelligence, and applications designed around problems that Western AI companies have historically overlooked. The opportunity is already drawing capital.

What to watch

06 Bn by 2030. Founders, marketers and analysts often spend days assembling presentations, only to have a number questioned in a meeting without being able to trace where it came from. Coreworks is building a platform that connects directly to a company’s data and generates a finished report or presentation, with every figure traceable to its source.

Founded in 2025 by Prashant Kumar and Pavan Sondur, the platform reads data semantically, surfaces the metrics and trends that matter, and produces an editable deck in minutes rather than days. Each metric links to the exact formula, cell, or row behind it, so updating the source automatically updates the output.