Indian AI innovations create their mark

While global tech giants have dominated headlines with billion-dollar models and record-breaking compute clusters, India created a solid attempt to arrive at a narrative of its own at the recently concluded India AI Impact Summit 2026. Deep-tech startups — building everything from electric air taxis to autonomous delivery robots — signalled that the countest’s innovation story is shifting well beyond services into frontier technology.Yet the most memorable moment of the summit came from an eight-year-old. Ranvir Sachdeva, who launched coding at the age of three and once revealcased his skills to Apple CEO Tim Cook, became the youngest keynote speaker at the event. He spoke on the convergence of ancient Indian philosophical considered and modern AI.

ET’s Tanya Pandey and Himanshi Lohchab spotlight a few of the startups that capture exactly what India has to offer right now.

Ottonomy.IO (2020)
Founders: Ritukar Vijay (CEO) and Pradyot Korupolu (CTO), along with Ashish Gupta and Hardik Sharma

Funding: $4.62 million

Investors: Pi Ventures, Connetic Ventures, Branded Hospitality Ventures, CoreNest Capital, Locker One Ventures, ADR Ventures, and Catalyst by Wellstar

A deep-tech robotics startup headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, Ottonomy builds fully autonomous delivery robots called Ottobots for both indoor and outdoor environments. The company aims to solve last-mile logistics and workforce shortages across hospitals, airports, industrial camputilizes, and cities. Their flagship model, Ottobot 2.0, features modular, customisable compartments, 3D lidar and camera-based navigation, zero GPS depfinishence, and a crab mode that allows sideways relocatement in tight spaces. The robots are managed through Ottumn.AI, a cloud-based platform that manages the entire robot fleet powered by Contextual AI 2.0, and are offered on a Robotics as a Service subscription model. Notable clients include Moderna, Wellstar Health, Lufthansa, Munich Airport, Pittsburgh International Airport, CVG Airport, DPD, and Sodexo. Ottonomy is also the first company to deploy autonomous delivery robots inside a live commercial airport in the United States. Their nearest-term revenue focus is healthcare, with lab sample and medication transport being prioritised.

Cyringe AI (2025)

Founders: Sagar Madhani (Founder and CEO) and Kushal Shah (Co-founder and CTO)

Funding: Bootstrapped, no external funding raised

Ecosystem support: Part of WeWork Labs, Mumbai

An AI-powered social media marketing platform that automates content creation, scheduling, and optimisation while incorporating human expertise for strategic guidance, combining AI automation with human oversight to deliver agency-quality results at predictable costs. The platform is tarreceiveed at Indian compact businesses, MSMEs, and early-stage startups. Tinquires that earlier required a team of 10 to 15 people and several days can now be completed in minutes, with an entest-level package starting at Rs 5,000. The core value proposition is building quality social media marketing financially accessible to businesses that would otherwise rely on expensive agency retainers. Key competitors include global AI writing and marketing tools like Jasper, Copy.ai, and Buffer.

The ePlane Company (2019)

Founders: Professor Satyanarayanan Chakravarthy, IIT Madras (also co-founder of space-tech startup AgniKul Cosmos), and Pranjal Mehta

Funding: $21.5 million

Investors: Speciale Invest, Micelio, and Antares Ventures

A deep-tech aerospace startup based in Chennai and incubated at IIT Madras, ePlane is developing the world’s most compact electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft for urban air mobility. The company aims to alleviate urban traffic congestion by offering air taxi, air ambulance, and air cargo services that are up to 7x quicker than on-road commutes. It is the first private Indian company to receive Design Organisation Approval (DOA) from the DGCA, certifying the safety and airworthiness standards for its flagship e200x air taxi. ePlane is currently manufacturing multiple prototypes, with ground testing and flight trials expected to continue through June 2026. Their first revenue-generating service is tarreceiveed to be an air ambulance, projected to start operations in early 2027. The DGCA has recently issued guidelines for setting up vertiports (landing pads with charging stations); however, infrastructure gaps are key bottlenecks for the air-taxi services to become a reality in India.

Chariot (2025)

Founders: Parth Sarthi, previously at Google DeepMind working on multimodal reasoning for Gemini Deep Think (Stanford CS alumnus), and Suvrat Bhooshan, previously at Facebook AI Research on multimodal transformers and distributed training (Stanford MS, Computer Science)

Funding: Not publicly disclosed

Investors: Not publicly disclosed

A frontier AI research lab headquartered in Delhi, Chariot builds systems that can understand, reason, and interact with the world through vision, text, and audio. The team includes researchers from Stanford, IITs, Google DeepMind, and Facebook AI Research. Their flagship product is Chariot-1, a Reasoning Speech Model currently in early access. Tarreceive utilize cases include voice assistants, content dubbing and localisation, audiobooks, call centre and IVR systems, accessibility tools, and gaming, with multilingual capability central to the product. A key bottleneck for Chariot and India’s broader foundational model ambitions is compute access and the ability to compete at scale with well-resourced global labs like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic, though the IndiaAI Mission’s GPU infrastructure support partially bridges that gap.