MeitY Launches AI Impact Startup Book at India Impact Summit 2026

Compendium Provides First-of-its-kind Consolidated Repository of AI Solutions Being Developed in India: Shri Abhishek Singh, Additional Secretary, MeitY

Scaling Impactful AI Use Cases Over Next 12–18 Months Critical for India to Become ‘Use-Case Capital’

The third day of the India AI Impact Summit 2026 witnessed the launch of the AI Impact Startup Book, a comprehensive study that captures the scale, diversity, and growing global footprint of India’s artificial intelligence and deep-tech startup ecosystem. The publication presents insights from a large sample of startups and highlights emerging trends across sectors, technologies, and geographies.

The report points to a strong presence of AI innovation in core sectors such as healthcare, alongside the rapid expansion of work in areas including foundation models, databases, and waste-tech solutions. It also underscores the growing development of voice- and vision-based applications tailored to India’s needs, the rise of startups beyond major metropolitan centres, and the role of government partnerships in enabling deployment and scale. The study further notes the emergence of indigenous AI infrastructure, the growing integration of edge AI with hardware capabilities, and the transition of several startups from early-stage impact to global growth.

Shri Abhishek Singh, Director General, NIC and Additional Secretary, MeitY and CEO of India AI emphasised that while the development of AI infrastructure—ranging from data centres and datasets to foundation models—is critical, the true measure of success lies in its ability to improve access to services and deliver tangible benefits for citizens, particularly in sectors such as healthcare, agriculture, education and employment. He noted that a large number of Indian startups are already building impactful solutions in these areas, and that there is a growing need for a structured mechanism to identify, evaluate and scale such innovations across government and public systems.

Highlighting the objective behind the publication, he said the compendium provides a first-of-its-kind consolidated repository of AI solutions being developed in India, enabling ministries, states and institutions to assess their maturity, understand their real-world performance and adopt them for population-scale deployment. He added that initiatives such as language-enabled agricultural advisory services demonstrate the potential of AI to deliver last-mile access across multiple Indian languages and dialects, provided richer datasets and coordinated implementation efforts are undertaken.

He underlined that the next phase of India’s AI journey will depend on systematically connecting solution providers with implementing agencies and moving from pilot-stage innovation to large-scale adoption across sectors.

In his address, he said that if India has to become the use-case capital, it will need to scale up their impactful solutions. He remarked that one hundred solutions are listed here, and if in the next 12 to 18 months, we can scale up even 10 of them, it will be a significant step forward.

Addressing the gathering, Mr. Sushant Kumar, Founder and CEO, Kalpa Impact, said that a set of eight insights have been derived across this entire sample. “I would like to take out the eight insights that stood out to us. First, you see sectors like health represented, but we are also now seeing a breadth of innovative sectors based on foundation models and databases. Close to 47% of our early-stage ventures have a local presence, and by the growth stage, nearly 68% are operating internationally. India is building foundation models. India is building infrastructure. And last, but not least, is edge innovation. With that, I would welcome you to explore this book,” he said.

The launch underscored the growing maturity of India’s AI startup landscape and its evolution from early experimentation to globally competitive innovation, supported by an enabling policy environment, access to digital public infrastructure and expanding international market linkages.