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A swathe of new-age AI-powered startups are emerging across the Indian heartland in places ranging from Shillong in the NorthEast to Raipur in central India and across Coimbatore and Kochi in the south. These ventures are riding on local talent, cost efficiency and the need for diverse inputs to build the curated, Indic language technology models and services that the AI revolution is seeding. With access to cheaper talent, lower rentals and operational expenses, better quality of life than the metros and remote working arrangements, these companies do not feel the need to migrate to the metros as yet.
Tech knows no bounds The e-learning segment is among the early adopters of GenAI and Kochi-based Mohammed Hisam understands that very well. The founder and CEO of Entri, a vernacular-language platform for job seekers, aims to bridge the skill gap among the regional workforce and AI assistance can unlock new opportunities, Hisam said. “Real-time doubt resolution is accelerated by GenAI by manyfolds.
Our personal AI tutor, the Entri Copilot is able to interact with users in their local language,” Hisam said. The platform has 14 million users across 22 Indian languages. The Kerala Startup Mission-incubated startup has raised Series A funding and is backed by Omidyar Network, Verlinvest and Ram Shriram (first investor in Google).
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Discover the stories of your interest Blockchain 5 Stories Cyber-safety 7 Stories Fintech 9 Stories E-comm 9 Stories ML 8 Stories Edtech 6 Stories ETtech Entri has employed 600 people in Kochi (Kerala) and Tamil Nadu (Coimbatore) and recently started a sales office in Bangalore. Meanwhile, some founders are introducing global customers to India’s lesser-known cities. Harsha P Deka, founder and CEO of 3Daily – an AI 3D modelling company, is putting Guwahati, Assam on the global map by serving customers in 150 countries.
“Today, all AI models for the 3D industry are trained on two-dimensional data images. We are the first company in the world to build the largest library of 10 million 3D dataset which we have used to train our AI model and which will serve as the foundation for many gaming and art applications,” Deka said. He said that Northeastern states have a creative flavour.
“Therefore, training 3D artists in Guwahati was not a challenge. This, coupled with our engineering team in Bangalore and remote engineering talent from tier 2 cities, has been immensely beneficial for us. In terms of overhead costs, Guwahati is quite affordable.
” However, raising funds from Guwahati was a challenge which required frequent travel to Bangalore, Deka said. Funded by the Dholakia venture, Chennai Angels etc., 3Daily plans to open offices in the US, South Korea and Japan.
ETtech Meanwhile, Pune, the hub software developer talent, is offering founders a respite from the hustle and bustle of neighbouring metro Mumbai. “It is easy to convince young developers and managers to move to Pune,” said Dipanjan Dey, cofounder and CEO of Kombai, a frontend devtools startup which recently raised a $4.5 million seed round led by Stellaris Venture Partners and Foundation Capital.
The VC perspective Investors, on the other hand, are rooting for these ventures in deeper geographies of India through academic incubators. Startup missions from State governments are also enabling up-and-coming cities to become hubs of tech talent. Cornerstone Ventures said cities like Pune, Raipur, Indore, Cochin, Surat, Ahmedabad and Jaipur have shown immense potential for tech innovation.
“Various State governments like UP, Bihar, Orissa, Kerala and Maharashtra are enabling the ecosystem with incubation fund of funds schemes,” said Abhishek Prasad, managing partner at Cornerstone Ventures. “Even central government backed Startup India Fund of Funds managed by SIDBI, has invested in our pool to back such startups. And they have scoring systems that track metrics which are so unique in the VC world, like job creation, livelihood enablement, diversity footprint etc.
” he said. The emergence of Indic-language models has created a unique opportunity for startups to build unique services in Indian languages, said Ashwin Raguraman, co-founder and partner, Bharat Innovation fund. “That’s where technology coupled with regional diversity will create a new cohort of ventures in deeper geographies of India.
However, we have seen the emergence of some greenshoots and startups are still migrating to presence in large cities like Bangalore to access, in their scaling up journey,” he said..
