Startup Spotlights

For decades, the image of a successful Indian entrepreneur was someone with years of industry experience, an MBA from a top institution, and a network of well-connected mentors.

That image is changing.

Today, some of the most exciting innovation is coming from an unexpected place: college campuses. Young men and women, barely out of their teens, are spotting problems, building solutions, and launching ventures that compete with established players.

If 2025 was the year of the “performance-linked restructuring”—a polite term for the layoffs that swept through India’s startup ecosystem—then 2026 is shaping up to be the year of the great rebound.

After months of caution, cost-cutting, and consolidation, a new narrative is emerging. Startup hiring is not just recovering; it is evolving. And at the heart of this revival is a single, transformative force: Artificial Intelligence.

From the bustling offices of Bengaluru to emerging tech hubs in Pune, Indore, and Coimbatore, founders are dusting off their hiring plans. But this time, they aren’t hiring for just any role. They are hiring for the future. The demand is surging for AI/ML engineers, data scientists, prompt engineers, MLOps specialists, and product managers with AI experience.

For the past two years, the AI world has been obsessed with one thing: capability. Who can build the largest model? Who can achieve the lowest perplexity score? Who can generate the most convincing human-like text?

But as enterprises rush to deploy generative AI in production—powering customer support chatbots, internal knowledge bases, and code-generation tools—a new, more urgent question has emerged: How do we make sure this thing doesn’t go rogue?

The answer lies in a new category of software often called AI safety and security infrastructure. And one of the most prominent players in this space, Promptfoo, is now reportedly in acquisition talks.

For years, green hydrogen has been hailed as the “holy grail” of the energy transition. The concept is elegant: use renewable energy (solar/wind) to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, creating a zero-carbon fuel that can power heavy industry, fertilize crops, and propel long-haul transport.

But there has always been a catch: the cost.

Green hydrogen remains significantly more expensive to produce than its carbon-intensive cousin, grey hydrogen (made from natural gas). The primary bottleneck? The efficiency and durability of the electrolyser—the machine that actually performs the water-splitting magic.

For over a decade, the narrative of Indian entrepreneurship has been dominated by three cities: Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Delhi-NCR. These metros have rightfully earned their reputation as the nerve centers of the country’s startup ecosystem, producing unicorns, attracting global capital, and nurturing world-class talent.

But quietly, steadily, a transformation has been underway. Tier-2 startup hubs like Jaipur, Indore, Coimbatore, Lucknow, Ahmedabad, Bhubaneswar, Chandigarh, Nagpur, Trichy, Surat, and Kochi are emerging as formidable contenders in India’s innovation story.

In a landmark move for the Indian artificial intelligence ecosystem, Sarvam AI, one of the country’s most promising deep-tech startups, has announced the launch of a comprehensive accelerator programme designed to nurture the next generation of India-centric AI solutions.

The initiative comes on the heels of Sarvam’s breakthrough with its 105-billion-parameter large language model (LLM), which reportedly outperforms larger global models on Indic language benchmarks. Now, the company is turning its attention to empowering the broader developer and startup community.