Nearly half of Peak XV’s new Surge cohort are AI

"It is premature to say that India has lost the AI race" MUMBAI: Peak XV Partners’ seed-stage investing platform Surge is backing 18 early-stage startups building across AI, robotics, space, consumer, healthcare, music and fintech as part of its latest cohort. The set of fledgling startups reflects three shifts playing out across early-stage technology: familiar consumer behaviours being rebuilt around new expectations; AI moving from a feature to the underlying architecture of products; and technology increasingly leaving the screen to tackle physical infrastructure and the real world.In an interaction, Rajan Anandan, MD, Peak XV and Surge said that about 50% of them are essentially AI native companies that are either reimagining consumer experiences or providing the infrastructure required to safely deploy AI across the enterprise. “But what's also interesting is, you know, we have a bunch of companies that go beyond AI, right? So, we have our first medical products company. They're actually in stealth. We have an education company, it's actually an offline education company. They're currently in stealth. We also have a space tech company,” Anandan said.It is premature to say that India has lost the AI race, Rajan said. “We couldn't be more excited about AI in India. Right. I think a lot of the public narrative is rightly focused on the capital markets, public AI stocks. But if you look at the private markets, at the application layer, you're looking at hundreds of companies,” Rajan said, adding that there are a lot of opportunities in voice and consumer AI spaces here.“Voice AI will be the first billion dollar revenue category in India. And when it comes to consumer AI, India has more consumer AI startups than the US,” Rajan said.You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.