GenAI Startups Eye India's Next 500 Million Users with Real-World Use Cases Founders and industry leaders of key startups said they are deploying AI beyond chatbots and content generation to solve mission-critical challenges in various sectors
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Top artificial intelligence (AI)-based startups are exploring how they can leverage generative AI (GenAI) to reach the next 500 million users in India across key sectors like defence, agriculture, digital lending, and immersive education.
Founders and industry leaders of key startups said at a recent panel discussion that they are deploying AI beyond chatbots and content generation to solve mission-critical challenges in sectors where privacy, accessibility, and affordability are paramount. The panel was part of the Entrepreneur India event held in New Delhi on September 23.
For Rabbitt AI, the entry point into GenAI wasn't consumer apps but national security. "When everybody was building LLMs, we asked: where is intelligence required, but privacy is of utmost concern? We shortlisted healthcare, education, and defence," said Harneet Singh, Founder and CAIO, Rabbitt AI.
The company's first project involved working with the South Korean Navy in 2023 to improve vision-language models for detecting naval mines. "Big is no longer beautiful; small is soothing," Singh said, explaining why they built compact in-house models that can process sonar, radar, and drone data and respond like an experienced military general.
In the financial services sector, Lentra has leveraged GenAI to overhaul the digital lending journey. "Our success story was built on the back of India's digitalization push between 2012 and 2015," Kanhiya Gautam, CTO, Lentra said. "We had a dream of 100 per cent digital lending – paperless, presence-less, and seamless. With AI-driven document processing and fraud detection, we have brought down go-to-market timelines for lenders from months to weeks."
Nagarro, a global IT services firm, highlighted how GenAI has transformed its approach to building enterprise solutions. "We were working with foundational models even before GenAI became a buzzword," said Ganesh Sahai, CTO, Nagarro. "Now the art of solutioning has taken a very interesting turn. We call it 'fluidic intelligence' where we blend models to solve very specific problems for clients."
For Avataar, an AI company backed by Sequoia and Tiger Global, agriculture is key to unlocking India's next 500 million users. "You cannot talk about India's future without addressing agriculture, which employs over 45 per cent of the workforce," said Gaurav Baid, Co-founder, Avataar.
The company recently built a plant disease prediction model using smaller, cost-efficient LLMs trained to rival GPT-4 in accuracy. "A farmer in Maharashtra can upload a photo of a tomato crop and instantly know if it has late blight, plus the steps to cure it. That's impact at scale, and at a fraction of the cost."
Education was identified as another sector ripe for AI adoption. "The quickest way to measure is by seeing how many students are already using AI tools—from ChatGPT to learning assistants," noted Rabbitt AI's Singh. "India's reliance on rote learning makes it a natural fit for adaptive AI-driven education tools."
The panelists agreed that while global headlines on GenAI often focus on flashy applications, India's opportunity lies in designing inclusive and cost-efficient systems for underserved sectors. As GenAI evolves, the challenge before us is to design AI that speaks our language, understands our culture, and delivers real impact on the ground.
