Only two Indian apps crack India's top 20 by daily active users.

Indian apps hold 35 of the top 100, 123 of 300.

U.S. apps lead with 44 of top 100, 74 of 300.

Source: Indiadispatch

1) Infrastructure

• Multimodal data: extract structure from documents, images, and videos for the enterprise
• Agent-native infrastructure: support massive "agent-speed" workloads
• Multimodal creative tools: give a model whatever form of reference content you have and work with it to make something new or edit an existing scene
• Al-native data stack: how Al agents navigate context problems the evolution of BI tools
• Interactive video: starts feeling like a place we can actually step into

2) Consumer

• Al-native university: professors become architects of learning, curating data, tuning models
• Healthy MAUs emerge: consumers who aren't sick but want to monitor their health
• ChatGPT becomes the Al app store: developers can now tap ChatGPT's 900M users
• World models in storytelling: full 3D environments from text prompts

3) Crypto

• Privacy creates network effects: privacy differentiates chains and creates chain lock-in
• Prediction markets scale: become bigger, broader, and smarter
• Know your agent: agents will need cryptographically signed credentials to transact
• Staked media: not only embraces idea of having skin in the game, but supplies the proof

4) Enterprise fintech

• Systems of record lose primacy: the interface becomes a dynamic agent layer
• Vertical Al goes multiplayer: the collaboration layer becomes the moat
• Voice agents expand: handling entire workflows and customer relationship cycles
• Al-native banking infrastructure: streamlined and parallelized workflows

5) American Dynamism

• Al-native industrial base: companies built with simulation, automated design, and operations from day one
• Factory mindset: modular deployment of Al with skilled workers to make complex processes operate like assembly lines
• Physical observability: understanding what's happening in cities, power grids, in real time
• Autonomous scientific labs: labs that close the loop from hypothesis to experiment design

Darren Mowry, who leads Google’s global startup organization across Cloud, DeepMind, and Alphabet, says startups with these below hooks have their “check engine light” on.

The two once-hot business models are looking more like cautionary tales:

• LLM wrappers
• AI aggregators

LLM wrappers are essentially startups that wrap existing large language models, like Claude, GPT, or Gemini, with a product or UX layer to solve a specific problem. An example would be a startup that uses AI to help students study.

“If you’re really just counting on the back-end model to do all the work and you’re almost white-labeling that model, the industry doesn’t have a lot of patience for that anymore,” Mowry said on this week’s episode of Equity.

Wrapping “very thin intellectual property around Gemini or GPT-5” signals you’re not differentiating yourself, Mowry says.

“You’ve got to have deep, wide moats that are either horizontally differentiated or something really specific to a vertical market” for a startup to “progress and grow,” he said. Examples of the deep-moat LLM wrapper type include Cursor, a GPT-powered coding assistant, or Harvey AI, a legal AI assistant.

In other words, startups can no longer expect to slap a UI on top of a GPT and get traction on their product like they could, perhaps, in mid-2024 when OpenAI launched its ChatGPT store. The challenge now is to build sustainable product value.

AI aggregators are a subset of wrappers — they’re startups that aggregate multiple LLMs into one interface or API layer to route queries across models and give users access to multiple models. These companies typically provide an orchestration layer that includes monitoring, governance, or eval tooling. Think: AI search startup Perplexity or developer platform OpenRouter, which provides access to multiple AI models via a single API.

While many of these platforms have gained ground, Mowry’s message is clear to incoming startups: “Stay out of the aggregator business.”

Generally speaking, aggregators aren’t seeing much growth or progression these days because, he says, users want “some intellectual property built in” to ensure they’re routed to the right model at the right time based on their needs — not because of behind-the-scenes compute or access constraints.

Mowry has been in the cloud game for decades, cutting his teeth at AWS and Microsoft before setting up shop at Google Cloud, and he’s seen how this plays out. He said the situation today mirrors the early days of cloud computing in the late 2000s/early 2010s as Amazon’s cloud business started taking off.

At that time, a crop of startups sprang up to resell AWS infrastructure, marketing themselves as easier entry points that provided tooling, billing consolidation, and support. But when Amazon built its own enterprise tools and customers learned to manage cloud services directly, most of those startups were squeezed out. The only survivors were the ones that added real services, like security, migration, or DevOps consulting.

AI aggregators today face similar margin pressure as model providers expand into enterprise features themselves, potentially sidelining middlemen.

For his part, Mowry is bullish on vibe coding and developer platforms, which had a record-breaking year in 2025 with startups like Replit, Lovable, and Cursor (all Google Cloud customers, per Mowry) attracting major investment and customer traction.

Mowry also expects strong growth in direct-to-consumer tech, in companies that put some of these powerful AI tools into the hands of customers. He pointed to the opportunity for film and TV students to use Google’s AI video generator Veo to bring stories to life.

Beyond AI, Mowry also thinks biotech and climate tech are having a moment — both in terms of venture investment going into the two industries and the “incredible amounts of data” startups can access to create real value “in ways we would never have been able to before.”

Source: TechCrunch

This week's launch of 5 indigenous LLMs, ranging from Sarvam's 105B model to Tech Mahindra's Hindi-first educational AI.

Which one have you given a try yet, and what's your feedback on them?

Over the last two years at Microsoft, and previously as Chief Operating Officer at Instacart and a Vice President at Meta, Asha has helped build and scale services that reach billions of people and support thriving consumer and developer ecosystems. She brings deep experience building and growing platforms, aligning business models to long-term value, and operating at global scale, which will be critical in leading our gaming business into its next era of growth.

Matt Booty will become Executive Vice President and Chief Content Officer, reporting to Asha. Matt’s career reflects a lifelong commitment to games and to the people who make them. Under his leadership, Microsoft Gaming has grown to span nearly 40 studios across Xbox, Bethesda, Activision Blizzard, and King, which are home to beloved franchises including Halo, The Elder Scrolls, Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Diablo, Candy Crush, and Fallout.

Source: Microsoft

Sarvam founder Pratyush Kumar says, "We’re gradually rolling out Indus on a limited compute capacity, so you may hit a waitlist at first. We will expand access over time.

Also, we believe Sovereign AI must be built with the country, not just for it. That means learning from the people who understand India best - its everyday users, developers, researchers, and creators. So, try out the app and let us know what works well and what doesn't. We are in listen mode."

Check them out here.

OpenAI says 18 to 24-year-olds account for nearly 50% of ChatGPT usage in India.

The company said on Friday that users between 18 and 24 years of age accounted for nearly 50% of messages sent to ChatGPT in the country, and users under 30 accounted for 80%.

The AI lab said Indians use ChatGPT mostly for work, with 35% of all messages relating to professional tasks, compared to 30% globally.

In particular, the company’s coding assistant, Codex, is seeing strong traction: OpenAI said Indians use Codex three times more than the global median, and weekly usage has increased by four times since the tool got a Mac app two weeks ago. Users in India are also asking three times as many coding-related questions as the median.

This is in line with findings from Antropic, which earlier this week said 45.2% of Claude’s tasks map to software-related use cases in India.

OpenAI said outside of work tasks, 35% of messages to ChatGPT from Indians requested guidance, 20% concerned questions about general information, and 20% were requests for the bot to produce or help with writing.

India is OpenAI’s second-largest market with more than 100 million weekly users, and the company has been actively trying to court Indians for its AI tools and services. The company offers a sub-$5 subscription tier in the country, and last year even ran promotional campaigns to spur adoption.

“AI adoption is moving faster than our ability to measure it – and that’s a challenge for anyone trying to make smart decisions. Signals is our way of putting real-world evidence on the table, so India’s AI debate can be grounded in facts, not hype,” OpenAI’s chief economist Ronnie Chatterji said in a statement.

Source: TechCrunch

For software businesses that suffer from free trial abuse, stripe is introducing a new API which auto predicts if your users are fraud-y or otherwise low likelihood to convert to a paid plan.

Source: Jefff Weinstein (Product @ stripe)

Reach out at jweinstein[at]stripe[dot]com

At the India AI Impact Summit 2026, Chairman & Managing Director of Reliance Industries Limited, Mukesh Ambani, says,

"Today, on behalf of the Reliance Group and Jio Intelligence, I want to make three announcements.

• Announcement one, Jio connected India to the internet era. Jio will now connect India to the intelligence era. We will deliver intelligence to every citizen, every sector of the economy, and every facet of social development and every service of government. Jio will do so with the same reliability, quality, scale, and extreme affordability that transformed connectivity. India cannot afford to rent intelligence. Therefore, we will reduce the cost of intelligence as dramatically as we did the cost of data...
• Announcement 2, Jio, together with Reliance, will invest 10 lakh crores over the next seven years, starting this year...
• Announcement 3, Jio Intelligence will build India's sovereign compute infrastructure through three bold initiatives. One, gigawatt-scale data centers. We already started construction on multi-gigawatt AI-ready data centers at Jamnagar.

Over 120 megawatts will come online in the second half of 2026 this year and a clear path to gigawatt-scale compute for training and large scale inference. Two, our green energy advantage. We have an in-house energy advantage with up to 10 gigawatts of ready green power surplus anchored by solar in both Kutch and Andhra Pradesh. Three, a nationwide edge compute, an edge compute layer deeply integrated with Jio's network will make intelligence responsive, low latency, and affordable close to where Indians live, learn, and work..."

Source: ANI

As per a statement from the Gates Foundation, Bill Gates will not be delivering keynote address at India AI Summit 2026, and instead the Gates Foundation will be represented by President of Africa and India Offices - Ankur Vora.

Source: Gates Foundation

Galgotias University was accused of showcasing commercial robot (Unitree Go2 robot) as built by the university, at Delhi AI Summit. They put out a statement after the dispute.

Now reports are coming in that they have been asked to vacate the AI Impact Summit.

Source: ANI

Emergent says it took them 8 months to reach to this run rate.

They have even launched an app, where you can build, deploy and publish Vibe coded apps to the app store/play store.

Source: Emergent

Designed and built in India, fitted with Sarvam AI.

You wear it. It listens, understands, responds, and captures what you see. And you can build custom experiences for it with the Sarvam platform.

The South Goa consumer disputes redressal commission issued a bailable warrant against Ola Electric Technologies Pvt Ltd founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal for failing to remain present before the commission despite being given prior notice.

The commission directed Bengaluru police to arrest him and produce him before the commission in Margao on Feb 23 at 10.30am. He can be released on bail of Rs 1.47 lakh, said president of the commission Sanjay Chodankar in the order.

The commission issued a notice to Aggarwal, directing him to personally remain present on Feb 4 for clarification on the whereabouts of the complainant’s bike and to explain why it was not repaired and delivered to him after considerable time. However, he failed to remain present.

The complainant said that he communicated the errors and manufacturing defects to the company, but there was no response. After repeated complaints at the store in Mormugao, he then took the scooter to the company showroom. His complaint stated that the company rectified the defect of the brand-new scooter, estimated at Rs 18,627, and handed it over to him. He stated that thereafter the problem persisted, besides another issue regarding bluetooth connectivity.

He stated that the scooter is in the custody of the company and he is seeking a refund of the entire Rs 1.47 lakh, along with Rs 50,000 as compensation in lieu of loss of value of money, harassment, mental pain, and agony suffered by him.

Source: TOI

Razorpay on February 17 announced a strategic partnership with global artificial intelligence coding firm Replit to power payments for Indian users and enable developers to monetize AI-built applications using local payment methods.

Developers can integrate UPI and card payments into Replit apps. Integration allows seamless monetisation for Indian AI builders.

The partnership aims to address this gap by enabling seamless rupee payments for subscriptions and embedding local payment methods into AI-built applications.

“What’s exciting about Razorpay is how forward-looking they are with AI. They already have a product around agentic payments,” Replit chief executive officer Amjad Masad.

“Developers are increasingly building conversational AI and they should be able to integrate payments in a much more seamless way. Payments are going to be deeply integrated into the agentic AI layer.”

Source: Money Control

“India represents one of the world’s most promising opportunities to bring the benefits of responsible AI to vastly more people and enterprises,” said Irina Ghose, Managing Director of India, Anthropic. “Already, it’s home to extraordinary technical talent, digital infrastructure at scale, and a proven track record of using technology to improve people’s lives. That’s exactly the foundation you need to make sure this technology reaches the people who can benefit from it most.”

More than a billion people in India speak one of over a dozen officially recognized languages, but AI models continue to perform better in English than they do in other languages. Six months ago, they launched a company-wide effort to narrow this gap by curating higher-quality, more representative training data in 10 of the most widely spoken languages throughout India: Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, and Urdu. This resulted in improvements to their models, and they continue to work on enhancing their fluency.

Source: Anthropic

Peter Steinberger, who created the AI personal assistant, previously ClawdBot, then MoltBot and now known as OpenClaw, has joined OpenAI.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X that in his new role, Steinberger will “drive the next generation of personal agents.” As for OpenClaw, Altman said it will “live in a foundation as an open source project that OpenAI will continue to support”

Source: Peter Steinberger