India’s GenAI Funding Summer Begins

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THE WEEKLY NEWSLETTER OF AIM. Sunday, Jan 28, 2024 | Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here By Amit Naik This week, India witnessed its first AI Unicorn, Krutrim AI, which raised $50 million in funding from Matrix Partners and other investors to build India’s first complete AI computing stack. Another AI startup, RagaAI, built by former NVIDIA and Ola exec Gaurav Agarwal, came out of stealth mode with the announcement of $4.7 million in funding to build the world's first automated platform to fix AI models from failing. The funding season has barely begun, with Indian VCs sitting on $20 billion of dry powder, and AI, notably GenAI, is clearly on everyone's mind. A majority of the VCs are slowly transitioning to become AI leaders, not just companies.  "India has $20 billion of dry powder, that is INR 1.6 lakh crore of venture capital dry powder, waiting to be invested. The number one thing we're all going after is AI," said Peak XV Partners MD Rajan Anandan, adding that it has 400 active companies in India, of which about 100 are software product companies targeting the world, and 25 are AI companies.  Last year, Sarvam AI raised $41 million in Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures. YC-backed Bengaluru-based LLM startup Giga ML secured seed funding of $3.6 million in a round led by Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from Liquid 2 Ventures, 8vdX and angel investors.  Meanwhile, Google wants to invest about $4 million in Indian conversational AI startup CoRover. There are also rumours about AI4Bharat researchers considering raising $12 million from Peak XV Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners for an AI startup. Reliance Jio, on the other hand, has partnered with IIT Bombay to build BharatGPT and is looking to make significant investments in the coming years.  India currently has about 100 generative AI startups, and the ecosystem has cumulatively raised $700 million in the past three years. Over $500 million in funding was raised by 24 generative AI startups in 2023, as revealed by Tracxn. This year, the numbers are going to increase significantly, given the rise in demand for generative AI services and products across industries, particularly in the areas of coding, healthcare and education.  AIM predicts that the funding amount will increase multifold this year, infusing nearly $2-3 billion into the Indian AI-first startup ecosystem, particularly generative AI companies, as seen globally last year.  Last year, SenseAI announced the launch of a $25 million AI fund (INR 200 crore), which aims to invest in 18-20 AI-first startups from seed to Pre-Series A stages. Together also announced a $150 million early-stage fund to back AI startups. Many more funds focused on AI and deep tech will be launched in the coming months from big tech as well as early- to late-stage VC firms.  On the demand side, nearly 84% of Indian CEOs are raising new capital or reallocating budgets to invest in generative AI, compared to 70% globally. As per Infosys Knowledge Institute (IKI), the research arm of Infosys, the generative AI spending in APAC will triple in 2024, expected to surpass $3 billion. AI Forum for India. Our Discord Community for AI Ecosystem, In collaboration with NVIDIA. Join Today >> TOP STORIES OF THE WEEK >> Why Falcon Sucks In June last year, UAE's TII launched Falcon, an LLM that quickly topped the Hugging Face Open LLM Leaderboard and surpassed Meta's Llama 2 in benchmarks. Cut to the present, the leaderboard features models built on Mistral, Llama 2, and Chinese models like Yi-24B and Qwen-7B, but notably lacks any version of Falcon. Find out more about the model’s pitfalls and decline in popularity here.  Google Likely to Kill ChatGPT Soon While the news about Google’s Gemini Pro Beating GPT-4 is going viral, the tech giant recently released cool new generative AI features for Chrome, like tab organiser (much needed), custom AI-generated themes, and AI-powered writing assistance. It even released a text-to-video diffusion model called Lumiere. Google is unstoppable, and if this persists, it is most likely to kill ChatGPT, or certainly make a significant dent in its usage. Read more here. Indian States Vie for Semicon Pie Indian states are currently engaged in a competition to draw leading semiconductor companies to their respective regions. Gujarat, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Odisha, and Assam have come up with their own semiconductor policies to make their region a hub for silicon, since everyone wants a piece of the chip. Read the full story to find out who’s winning. PEOPLE & TECH >> Meet the Creator of ଓଡ଼ିଆ Llama When ChatGPT was introduced a year ago, Shantipriya Parida was quite disappointed that it did not understand any cultural context related to Odisha. Cut to the present, he built Odia Llama (Llama2-fine tuned LLM for Odia language) and started an open-source project called Odia Generative AI. Check out the journey here.  AIM VIDEOS >> How GenAI is Fueling Cars  In the latest episode of Tech Positivity, AIM gives you a glimpse into the future of cars powered by generative AI, literally bringing them to life! AIM EVENTS >> MLDS 2024  India’s biggest generative AI conference is barely a month away. Have you booked your spots yet for some insightful sessions, presentations and networking?  Date: February 1-2, 2024  Location: NIMHANS Convention Centre, Bengaluru Register now.  AIM SHOTS >> The FTC recently issued compulsory orders to leading generative AI firms, including Alphabet, Amazon, Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI, seeking details about their investments and partnerships. Know more here. Equinix introduced a fully managed private cloud service for enterprises to acquire and manage their NVIDIA DGX AI supercomputing infrastructure for developing and deploying custom generative AI models. Tavily, in partnership with LangChain, introduced GPT-Newspaper, an autonomous AI agent that handles everything from content creation to outlining and designing. Read the full story here. Siemens Healthineers, in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), launched an AI Lab focused on precision medicine. Bhashini recently introduced the OCR feature, called SCENE, in its beta version, which allows users to seamlessly extract text and enhance accessibility. Learn more about the feature here.  Infosys will use generative AI to enhance fan engagement, optimise player performance and facilitate digital content creation at the 2024 Australian Open (AO).  Download our mobile app Access our stories, video content and events on the go. Stay Connected info@analyticsindiamag.com © 2023 Analytics India Magazine Pvt Ltd and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. For more information, email info@analyticsindiamag.com

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