As AI reshapes industries, founders are increasingly building AI-native systems designed for production-grade deployment and real-world execution
The ninth edition of Inc42’s AI Startups To Watch highlights emerging Indian AI startups building across tutoring, agentic cybersecurity and workflow automation
From multimodal marketing agents to autonomous SecOps systems, these startups are betting on AI becoming an operational layer rather than just a productivity tool
India’s tech story is entering a nuanced phase, with AI pushing deeper into filmmaking, cybersecurity, enterprise workflows and education. Recently, AI-native studio Studio Blo teamed up with filmmaker Rajkumar Hirani on a branded film for Bajaj Group, using AI for facial cloning, voice recreation and visual storytelling. In enterprise India, the momentum was just as visible. Rapido disclosed that nearly two-thirds of its coding workflows are now AI-assisted.
Meanwhile, startups building infrastructure for enterprise automation, cybersecurity orchestration and AI-native operations continue to attract investor and enterprise attention.
But the excitement is now being matched by scrutiny. GitHub’s pivot to usage-based Copilot pricing has sparked fresh concerns about rising enterprise AI costs, as many companies reassess how expensive frontier model adoption could become at scale. The question is no longer whether AI can be embedded into more workflows, but how economically durable those deployments will be once the bill comes due.
Yet, founders are building aggressively with the belief that AI will evolve from a productivity layer into an execution layer, which will increasingly run tasks, systems and decisions across industries. This belief continues to fuel a new generation of startups building the infrastructure, tools and applications needed to make AI operational.
Against this backdrop, Inc42 returns with its monthly ‘AI Startups To Watch’ series. The ninth edition highlights five emerging startups working across multimodal commerce intelligence, enterprise AI infrastructure, AI tutoring, autonomous security operations and agentic workflow automation.
Each one reflects a different part of the AI stack, but together they point to the same larger shift: AI in India is moving from experimentation to execution. With that said, here are the five emerging ventures that have made it to the ninth edition of Inc42’s AI Startups To Watch.
Editor’s Note: This is not a ranking. The startups featured here are a curated selection by the Inc42 editorial team and are listed alphabetically.
Short-form video may have democratised content creation, but for brands, understanding why content works remains a major blind spot. Bengaluru-based Flaunt is trying to solve this with its multimodal AI agents that analyse short-form videos beyond likes, captions and engagement metrics.
Founded in 2025, the startup helps beauty, fashion, and lifestyle brands identify trends, generate campaigns, and distribute content more effectively.
Three-Agent Stack: Flaunt’s platform operates through three AI agents — Discover, Create, and Distribute. Discover identifies emerging trends and creators; Create generates trend-aligned visuals and campaigns, and Distribute automates publishing and creator collaborations.
The startup claims its proprietary models can understand products, scenes, messaging, creators and audience reactions inside videos. Its systems are said to be trained on over 10 Mn short-form ads and 1.5 Mn creators, with the corpus expanding continuously through a real-time ingestion pipeline.
Flaunt is operating at the intersection of AI and marketing, a market valued at $20.44 Bn in 2024 and projected to reach $82.23 Bn by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 25%. Currently, the startup works with enterprise brands across India, Europe, the US, and the Middle East and was recently selected for the Snowflake AI Accelerator and Nasscom’s GenAI Cohort 4.
As enterprises increasingly experiment with AI, many are running into the same challenges: rising inference costs, deployment complexity and governance concerns. Hyderabad-based JupiterBrains is betting that smaller, specialised AI models can solve these problems more efficiently than relying entirely on frontier LLMs.
Founded in 2025 by former Microsoft, Amazon and Goldman Sachs executive Nilesh Potdar, the startup is building a small-model-first AI infrastructure platform for enterprise workflows across sectors such as BFSI, compliance, onboarding and document intelligence.
Its core product, the JupiterBrains AI Workbench, combines model routing, governance, observability, deployment tooling and workflow orchestration into a single enterprise stack.
Key areas JupiterBrains focuses on include:
The startup says its architecture allows enterprises to reduce inference costs while maintaining privacy, observability and deployment flexibility across cloud, hybrid, and on-premise environments. Operating in India’s enterprise agentic AI market, expected to reach $1.8 Bn by 2030, JupiterBrains claims it has already generated around ₹70 Lakh in consultancy revenue while scaling recurring platform subscriptions.
Enterprises may have adopted chatbots widely over the last few years, but operations in sectors such as banking, insurance and logistics remain heavily dependent on manual operations.
SubVerse AI wants to change this with its AI voice agents and autonomous workflow systems. Founded in 2023 by Tanmay Lad and Rishi Kumar, the startup has developed agents to support BFSI functions like collections, user onboarding, KYC, renewals and customer support operations. It operates in India’s conversational AI market, expected to reach a projected revenue of $3.8 Bn by 2033.
The Three-Layer Enterprise Stack: Its offerings include ConVerse for AI-powered customer interactions, AgentVerse for workflow execution and DataVerse for unified customer-data orchestration.
SubVerse AI says its platform integrates with over 30 enterprise systems, including Salesforce, ServiceNow, HubSpot and Freshworks, allowing enterprises to deploy pilots within 30 days. Among its showcased deployments is Acko Insurance, where the startup claims that its AI systems helped automate customer communication workflows and reduce operational costs.
As enterprises increasingly shift from assistant-style AI deployments towards operational AI systems, SubVerse AI is positioning itself as an infrastructure layer that can execute workflows autonomously rather than simply respond to queries.
Security teams today are flooded with alerts, fragmented tooling and dashboard-heavy workflows that often slow incident response. Bengaluru-based Trench Security is attempting to rebuild security operations around autonomous AI workflows.
Founded in 2025 by Michael Wilson Rebello and Gurucharan Raghunathan, the startup is building what it calls an AI-native operating system for modern security operations teams.
Instead of relying on traditional SIEM-style workflows, Trench connects enterprise security tools, endpoints, cloud systems, identity layers and SaaS applications into a unified AI-native security stack.
What Makes It Different: What differentiates it is how it brings security operations into the flow of work. Teams can investigate threats directly inside Slack and Microsoft Teams, verify users through automated workflows and rely on AI-led remediation and escalation systems to respond faster. At the same time, the platform provides unified visibility across fragmented security tools, reducing blind spots and operational complexity.
Its “Headless SecOps” approach allows AI agents to investigate suspicious activity, communicate with impacted users, escalate incidents to engineers and trigger remediation workflows autonomously. The startup already counts firms such as Whatfix and Ocrolus among its customers across India and the US.
It operates in India’s growing security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) market, projected to reach $214.2 Mn in revenue by 2030. The market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 21.5% between 2025 and 2030.
India’s education ecosystem may have shifted online over the last decade, but personalised doubt-solving still remains inaccessible for millions of students outside expensive coaching systems. Noida-based YoLearn.ai is trying to bridge that gap using voice-first AI tutoring.
Founded in 2025 by Kirti Prakash Mishra and Vishal Kashyap, YoLearn.ai is building an AI tutoring platform focused on India’s competitive exam ecosystem, including JEE, NEET, CBSE, ICSE and CUET preparation.
Students can ask doubts through voice in 22 Indian languages, while the AI tutor responds in real time, generates diagrams through a live sketchpad and adapts explanations based on a student’s learning progress.
Its core differentiators are as follows:
YoLearn currently operates in the AI tutoring market across web, Android and iOS platforms under a hybrid B2C and school-partnership model. The market is expected to reach $1.15 Bn in revenue by 2033, growing at a CAGR of 37.1% from 2026 to 2033, as students increasingly turn to AI-powered personalised learning platforms for exam preparation and doubt resolution. The startup claims to have crossed 100K app downloads and 10K monthly active users without paid marketing, while also being selected for NVIDIA’s Inception programme.
With inputs from Venu Rathore
Edited by Shishir Parasher
Creatives by Abhyam Gusai
Source: Inc42 - Startups
