NSIM

Indian AI startups shaping the shift from demo to deployment

India enters 2026 with an AI ecosystem that looks less like a playground and more like a mature industrial setup finally finding its shape. While early excitement around AI centred around demos, in the last couple of years the conversation has shifted to production readiness, domain specialisation, and control over compute. This is set to gain momentum in 2026.

The clearest signals are infrastructure that lowers resource barriers, silicon and edge efforts that bring models to low-connectivity contexts, and companies building agentic and vertical systems that solve domain-specific, business-critical problems.

Here are 10 startups working on structural problems rather than pitching yet another generic chat interface.

Maieutic: Generative AI for analogue and mixed-signal design

Maieutic aims to tackle a stubborn problem in semiconductor design: the labour-intensive work of analogue and mixed-signal engineering.

The company blends generative AI with domain-specific flows that help engineers read schematics, explore trade-offs, and propose alternative topologies. Its key value proposition is a copilot that reduces iteration time in portions of the design cycle that have historically required deep tacit knowledge.

This places Maieutic in the deeptech cohort that wants to accelerate time to market for custom silicon while preserving engineer oversight.

If Maieutic delivers reproducible quality gains, it would greatly bolster domestic semiconductor capability.

Neysa: AI acceleration cloud for enterprises

Neysa builds for the simple reality that models need affordable, governed compute if they are to move from experiments into enterprise. Its Velocis platform combines GPU-as-a-service, orchestration, observability and a PaaS (platform-as-a-service) layer oriented to generative AI workflows.

The product targets organisations that want the benefits of cloud-scale without giving up control over how their data and AI models are managed. This approach is particularly relevant for Indian financial institutions and government-linked projects that must balance innovation and compliance.

Neysa is trying to handle all the practical pieces of running AI, from hardware to deployment, in a way that works for regulated organisations.

Kluisz.ai: A private generative cloud for data-sovereign deployments

Kluisz.ai takes on the problem of running generative AI where data cannot leave the customer’s boundary. The company offers a private cloud and platform optimised for large language model workloads, including model fine-tuning and inference orchestration.

The pitch is aimed at large enterprises and regulated sectors that need rapid GenAI features without surrendering data control. Kluisz.ai focuses on helping enterprises run AI privately and safely, using tools that make models easier to manage. It is a middle path between public cloud convenience and the heavy lift of on-prem bespoke infrastructure.

The impact is that enterprises can deploy conversational and assistant-style products without risking compliance or leaking proprietary knowledge.

Azimuth AI: Edge silicon and ARKA chip collaboration

Azimuth AI is an example of hardware response to an edge-first problem. The company has partnered with established semiconductor teams to develop India-focused, low-power system-on-chip designs for vision and signal processing at the edge of a network.

These chips matter in environments where connectivity and power are limited, and where AI inference needs to run reliably on the device. Azimuth’s approach goes beyond chip design, combining silicon, runtime software, and model optimisation so that domain-specific workloads run efficiently on modest hardware.

For India, this is key to making AI useful in agriculture, healthcare, and industrial settings where network latency and cost would otherwise blunt capabilities.

UnifyApps: Enterprise operating system for AI

UnifyApps stitches together data, integrations, and agentic orchestration into a coherent platform for CIOs. The product aims to reduce the friction of pushing generative AI into core workflows by offering a six-layer architecture that covers integration, data governance, model hosting, and autonomous agents.

The company sells to teams that want to embed AI into business processes across functions.

UnifyApps’ growth and enterprise adoption shows that firms that make AI operational, and not just experimental, will be rewarded.

Fenmo AI: Agentic finance operations

Fenmo delivers autonomous agents for finance processes that are typically manual and loaded with exceptions. The company connects to ERP systems and automates workflows such as invoice matching, reconciliation, and financial close tasks while maintaining audit trails for human review.

The startup demonstrates that if agentic finance becomes reliable, it can shrink closing cycles and reduce time and resources spent on routine reconciliation while keeping humans in the loop for exceptions.

Revving.ai: AI-native DevOps and inference orchestration

Revving addresses the problem of getting AI models into production and keeping them there. The company builds tooling that automates deployment pipelines, manages GPU scheduling, and monitors inference latency.

It is not enough to have a good model; the operational cost of orchestration and performance tuning often restricts adoption. Revving recognises that AI models need to be managed like any other critical part of live software systems.

For enterprises that require low latency and predictability, especially in customer-facing systems, a dedicated orchestration fabric can make the difference between occasional experiments and continuous, business-critical AI.

OneOrg.ai: Domain knowledge models for enterprises

While general-purpose LLMs can be useful, they often miss industry-specific terms, regulatory context, and internal processes. OneOrg.ai builds sector-specific LLMs that ingest internal documents and preserve knowledge, enabling search, summarisation and decision support aligned to company practices.

Here the model is not the product but the infrastructure piece that powers workflows in pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, and other knowledge-intensive sectors.

The competitive edge for OneOrg.ai is its ability to extract value from messy, siloed enterprise data and make it available in context-sensitive ways.

Othor AI: Narrative approach and agentic insights

Othor AI aims to change the way executives and teams consume analytics by translating data into narratives and forecasts. The product uses generative models to create human-readable analysis, suggestions, and scenario planning rather than relying on dashboards alone.

This matters because many decisions require synthesis across multiple data sources and an ability to reason about trade-offs.

Othor turns fragmented data into coherent stories that can be interrogated with follow-up questions, effectively layering agentic capabilities on top of business intelligence.

For organisations seeking faster strategic cycles, this narrative-first approach can reduce time to insight.

Triagz: AI for endpoint research and defender tooling

Triagz works at the intersection of AI and cybersecurity by building tools that accelerate incident triage and endpoint research. Modern cyber attacks generate huge volumes of telemetry, and investigators need fast, prioritised context.

Triagz uses machine learning and generative techniques to surface relevant signals, propose remediation steps, and help human analysts focus on the highest-risk items. The product aims to improve the analyst experience, because good security outcomes still depend on expert judgement.

As threat actors use automation and AI themselves, defenders who add AI to their toolset are better positioned to keep pace.

Honourable mentions

• MercuryAI, for model switching and unified LLM access, helping teams avoid lock-in and assemble best-of-breed stacks
• Ascimov, for quiet/background agentic assistants that reduce tool fatigue in sales and operations
• Trupeer, for AI-driven video production and content workflows, a product built for media companies that’s clearly finding customers