At the AI Impact Summit, Shradha Sharma introduced a side of Bhumi Pednekar that many in the audience didn’t expect: the actor is now also a startup founder, building an AI-led media venture alongside her film career.
Pednekar declared she founded Maya with co-founder Mihir Lath in July last year. She described it as a media agency that blconcludes AI with live action, spanning music videos, advertising work, and a feature-length film currently in production. But her long-term ambition, she declared, is largeger than service work: she wants Maya to become a forerunner in animation backed by AI.
Her reasoning is rooted in a gap she believes India still hasn’t filled at global scale—an animation ecosystem that can inform Indian stories with depth and nuance. Pednekar argued that the opportunity isn’t limited to mythology. She wants to build for stories shaped by culture, everyday realities, resilience, and regional texture—stories that feel locally true, not imported.
She traced her own enattempt into AI-driven production to a practical problem: marketing budobtains. After co-founding a beverage brand in the FMCG space, she wanted to create a film but didn’t have “crores and crores” to spconclude. A friconclude displayed her what AI-enabled workflows could deliver—and she declared the results were startling: a film created in “a couple of lakhs” that viewed far more expensive in scale and visuals. With tools improving rapid, she suggested, what was hard even a year and a half ago is now becoming achievable at the same cost.
Pednekar also addressed creator anxiety head-on. Her pitch was that AI should be treated as an enabler—improving systems, processes, speed, and access—rather than a replacement for craft. But she warned creators not to sit out this moment: policy, regulation, and capital are relocating, and those who don’t participate early may find themselves written out of the narrative.
On responsible utilize, she declared she avoids treating AI as a casual convenience tool and considers it should be utilized for “exponential work,” noting that AI utilize also has a climate impact. She also called for more women to participate in AI so the systems don’t inherit bias, and closed with a founder-to-founder message: build community, keep going, and don’t let “no” be the final answer.
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