Can India build its own ChatGPT? Hanooman.ai, Microsoft & CoRoverAI take the stage at ET Soonicorns Summit 2025
With its IndiaAI mission and a thriving AI-first startup ecosystem, India is racing to build its foundational AI model. What will it take to make this vision a reality? Visionary founders such as Dr Vishnu Vardhan and Ankush Sabharwal, and tech experts such as Sandeep Alur and Shalini Kapoor will reveal India's AI strategy at the ET Soonicorns Summit 2025. Discover the complete AI agenda inside.
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Time of India
3 days ago
- Time of India
Soonicorns at scale: The AI-driven sprint to India's next unicorn wave at ET Soonicorns Summit 2025
Academy Empower your mind, elevate your skills AI Investments in India – Chasing Hype or Backing Real Disruption? The Billion-Dollar AI Blueprint: Scaling Indian Startups in the Next Decade From Pilot to Product-Market Fit: AI Innovation Case Studies Pre-IPO to Bell Ringing: The CFO Playbook for 2025 AI's Ethical Crossroads: Innovation vs Manipulation in a Deepfake Era India's startup ecosystem is undergoing a paradigm shift as a wave of high-potential startups, or 'soonicorns,' races towards unicorn status. These soonicorns, riding on the back of breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI), are redefining the scaling blueprint—from deeptech research and development (R&D) to billion-dollar revenue models. The Economic Times (ET) Soonicorns Summit 2025, India's largest congregation of soonicorns, puts the spotlight at the heart of this acceleration, where the journey from lab to market meets real-world to data intelligence platform Tracxn, India is now home to 121 unicorns as of July 2025. The latest to join the club is Jumbotail, a business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce platform in the food and grocery sector, which achieved unicorn status on June 30, 2025 . While these billion-dollar ventures continue to capture headlines, it's the soonicorns—startups that have raised over $40 million in funding or achieved a valuation of over $100 million—that are powering India's deeptech ranks third globally in the startup ecosystem, behind only the United States (1,047 unicorns) and China (248 unicorns), according to the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. Domestically, Bengaluru leads the unicorn tally with 52 companies, followed by Gurugram and Mumbai with 19 unicorns each. But the real story of 2025 is how soonicorns are leveraging AI to achieve scale faster than and the scale blueprint in 2025With over 1.59 lakh startups officially recognised by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) as of January 2025, India's innovation economy is thriving. The artificial intelligence (AI) revolution has added a powerful accelerant. From predictive analytics to generative models, soonicorns across sectors are embedding AI into their core operations. The ET Soonicorns Summit 2025, scheduled for August 22 in Bengaluru, promises to unpack the billion-dollar playbooks that are enabling this ventures are finding fertile ground thanks to initiatives like the IndiaAI Mission, which offers graphics processing unit (GPU) access, cloud infrastructure, and ecosystem-wide support. These infrastructural tailwinds are translating to scale advantages across verticals including finance, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, and next-generation unicorns are being built on a foundation of sovereign tech, vernacular AI, and scalable infrastructure. Whether it's fine-tuning large language models for Indic languages, powering retail analytics, or combating financial fraud, soonicorns are innovating at every layer of the AI AI-driven leap from soonicorn to unicorn is characterised by faster product-market fit, deeper vertical integration, and global investor confidence. The result: startups born in AI labs are transforming into tomorrow's billion-dollar companies faster than ever ET Soonicorns Summit 2025 will spotlight over 50 speakers across a day-long agenda themed 'From Research Labs to Revenue Models: The Billion-Dollar Blueprint for Scaling Indian AI Startups.' Key panels include:A marquee fireside chat featuring InMobi Co-founder Mohit Saxena will explore 'The Next Frontier of Coding: Building a New Indigenous Tech Stack in the AI Age.'India's AI-first soonicorns are attracting investor interest not just because of valuations but due to their strategic positioning in emerging sectors. With projected global spending on vertical AI expected to reach $47 billion by 2030, India's deeptech soonicorns are ideally poised to capitalise. The confluence of compute, talent, and localised AI problems—from vernacular search to agri-intelligence—makes Indian soonicorns highly AI enables scale, it also raises questions around workforce impact, data sovereignty, and ethical use. Panels on the future of jobs and ethical AI development will tackle these head-on. Discussions will centre on how India's soonicorns can create inclusive, responsible, and globally competitive AI products without compromising on ethical unicorn dream is no longer a distant milestone but a tangible outcome for India's AI-first soonicorns. As technology, talent, and timing converge, the sprint to scale has begun. The ET Soonicorns Summit 2025 will not just chronicle this transformation—it will help architect it.360 One is the presenting partner of the ET Soonicorns Summit 2025.A startup with a valuation of $1 billion or above earns the unicorn title, typically due to market disruption and rapid innovation.A soonicorn is a high-potential startup that has raised over $40 million in funding or is valued at over $100 million, signalling strong growth potential toward becoming a of July 2025, India has 121 unicorns, making it the world's third-largest startup leads with 52 unicorns, while Gurugram and Mumbai are tied for second with 19 each. Bengaluru is also home to many of the leading AI serves as a core differentiator, helping soonicorns scale faster through automation, data intelligence, and product personalisation, supported by national initiatives such as the IndiaAI sessions featuring India's top AI founders, unicorn leaders, VCs, and policymakers, the Summit is where you will land strategic insights, investor access, and the AI blueprint to scale from soonicorn to unicorn.(This article is generated and published by the ET Spotlight team. You can get in touch with them at etspotlight@ .)
Time of India
3 days ago
- Time of India
Free AI training for 5.5 lakh village entrepreneurs: Ashwini Vaishnaw
The workforce manning the 5,60,000 lakh Common Service Centres across the country, will be imparted free training in Artificial Intelligence (AI), electronics and information technology minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Wednesday. The move is part of the government's aim to train 10 lakh citizens in advanced digital technologies such as AI, machine learning, data analytics, cybersecurity, AI as part of the India AI Mission Speaking at an event to mark the 16th establishment day of CSCs, which have grown to become one of the world's largest digital service delivery networks, Vaishnaw said VLEs will be trained in the latest technological trends. 'Under the IndiaAI mission, the government has decided to equip 10 lakh people with AI skills. Of this, we will give priority to and train 5.5 lakh VLEs,' Vaishnaw said, urging more village-level entrepreneurs to join the training programme.
Time of India
4 days ago
- Time of India
Sarvam AI will open source its IndiaAI Mission AI models
Bengaluru-based artificial intelligence (AI) startup will be open sourcing the models it is training as part of the IndiaAI Mission , Sarvam cofounder Vivek Raghavan, told will be done under permissible licenses, he said. The company has received the highest subsidy allocated under the IndiaAI Mission so far at Rs 98.68 crore, out of a bill of Rs 246.71 crore for access to 4,096 Nvidia H100 GPUs for six months, as per the IndiaAI part of the first phase of approvals, was selected by the IndiaAI mission to initiate the development of an indigenous foundational AI an open source software meeting at IIIT-D on Saturday, Abhishek Singh, chief executive, IndiaAI Mission, in a virtual address, had said that the Government of India-sponsored large language models (LLMs) (including Sarvam's) have been decided to be made open Tuesday, Singh confirmed the same to issue was first raised by Paras Chopra, founder and former chairman of software company Wingify . In a post on microblogging platform X on April 27, he had said, "So you're telling me that Deepseek with private funds can release an open source model, but govt awarding Rs 220 crores of public funds to Sarvam isn't asking for the same? This is tax payers money, so the full pipeline ought to be open source!"To which another cofounder Pratyush Kumar had responded, "This is not a grant. A gov body will take equity in Sarvam for the compute we receive. And we are committed to building public interest use-cases and enabling the ecosystem in various ways such as hyper-optimising the inferencing costs in India."India gave the cabinet approval for the Rs 10,000-crore IndiaAI Mission in March last year, with a target of procuring over 10,000 part of the IndiaAI mission, the government is incentivising the development of LLMs built by startups like Sarvam, Gnani, Gan, and Soket AI Labs with investment capital and other support. The move is aimed at building up India's AI Gupta, chief executive of Yotta Data Services, on June 28 revealed that out of 506 proposals received by the IndiaAI Mission for building foundation AI models, a striking 43 are specifically dedicated to building LLMs, underscoring the nation's strategic emphasis on sovereign and culturally relevant was speaking at a panel discussion at the AI for India Summit 2025, organised by AI4India in Bengaluru.
