Sam Altman’s high-profile visit to India has coincided with a surge of interest in developing indigenous Large Language Models (LLMs). This interest has been particularly amplified by the recent launch of DeepSeek-R1’s LLM, sparking nationwide discussion. Not to be left behind, venture capital funds seem to have started moving the floodlights on the tech start-ups that are building LLMs or applications based on LLMs.
“The mood was not this euphoric earlier. Till recently, they were keen on investing in deep tech, but tried to turn their backs on start-ups that were trying to build LLMs. Now they are beginning to ask questions on our efforts. This is the mood that I can see here at the meeting with Altman,” an LLM start-up founder who attended Altman told businessline.
“They were also keen on investing in start-ups that focus on building applications over the existing LLMs,” he said.
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The excitement is further fuelled after Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal posted a post on ‘X’, ‘offering to work with business and product leaders who have already started using AI as their ‘second brain’. Though he has not hinted at any investments, it still generated huge interest with product developers pouring in emails.
Rajat Arya, Founder and CEO of 169Pi, whose start-up 169Pi launches Alpie, a homegrown Indian LLM, said the VC’s interest was beginning to grow.
Alpie, an advanced AI assistant is offered for free. While top LLMs charge $20 a month for chatbot access, Rajat says his start-up challenges the status quo.
Rajat, who mobilised about ₹1 crore from personal funds to build the LLM, says the start-up is planning to raise $7-10 million to support its computing needs and hire highly qualified human resources, including PhDs from abroad, to support its expansion plans.
Alpie is looking to grow its team and infrastructure and is seeking funding to support these efforts.
Ganesh Gopalan, Co-Founder & CEO of Gnani.ai, sees a strong inbound interest from private equity and venture capital firms, driven by the global focus on companies revolutionising businesses with voice AI agents.
“Investors are keen on start-ups that drive business transformation through AI-powered automation, given the rising demand for intelligent customer engagement solutions. The focus is on scalable AI solutions, strong partnerships, and real-world impact, making the sector highly attractive for funding opportunities,” he said.
He said his start-up is actively collaborating with larger players, both global and local, for strategic partnerships and projects.
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“We have partnerships with system integrators, BPOs, contact center software providers, and third parties to enhance customer engagement and operational efficiency,” he said.
“Our scalable solutions and flexible integration capabilities make us an ideal partner for companies looking to leverage AI-driven automation in contact centers and customer interactions. We are actively scouting for new partners in multiple locations,” he said.
Sateesh Andra, Managing Director of VC firm Endiya Partners, said that his company invested in multiple AI Copilot investments. “These start-ups are leveraging the existing LLMs,” he said.
Endiya invests in early-stage product start-ups in sectors like enterprise, industrial tech, healthcare & life sciences.
Jivi, which built an LLM-based healthcare platform, attracted investments from AI Fund and Reddy Ventures. AI Fund, led by Andrew Ng, and GV Sanjay Reddy, Chairman of Reddy Ventures. They are so interested in the project that they joined Ankur Jain (former CPO, BharatPe) as Co-Founders.
The two investment firms invested an undisclosed amount in the platform, which recently beat established LLMs, including OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Med-PaLM 2 to become the number one on the Open Medical LLM Leaderboard.
“Their joining on board helped us raise funds and focus on building the niche product. We have sufficient funds now. We would like to reach certain milestones in terms of the number of users and then we will go in for fund-raising for the expansion,” he said.
