Rajan Anandan is Managing Director at Peak XV Partners and a veteran technology leader who previously led Google, Microsoft, and Dell in India.
He is passionate about backing ambitious founders who think big, stay humble, learn quickly, and deeply understand their users and markets, with a particular focus on founder-market fit and transformative, 10x opportunities.
He is the co-author of the book, Lift-Off Nation: Why we are entering the golden age of Indian startups – exploring how India’s rapidly evolving startup ecosystem could help the country reclaim a leading share of the global economy, highlighting world-class talent, breakthrough innovation, increased venture funding, and supportive digital infrastructure.
Rajan’s co-author is Saurabh Srivastava – one of India’s leading entrepreneurs, investors and institution builders. He is Co-founder and former Chairman of NASSCOM, the IVCA, TIE (world’s largest organisation focused on entrepreneurship) and the Indian Angel Network, India’s first angel investor group.
Saurabh also chairs TDB’s investment committee set up for investing in companies raising money from the RDI Fund, as part of the strategy to invest $11 billion in deep-tech companies to create strategic autonomy and sovereign technology for India. He was awarded the Padma Shri, India’s fourth highest civilian honour, in 2016.
Having the chance to sit with both Rajan and Saurabh was a treat and hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.
M.R. Rangaswami: Why do you think the time is now for innovation and entrepreneurship to take off in India?
Rajan Anandan: This is a unique time in India because five forces are converging in the country for the very first time.
First, world-class talent is starting up. India’s first big startups like Flipkart, InMobi and Freshworks became training grounds. A new generation of founders learned how to build and scale at these “founder factories”, and they’re now starting their own companies. Others are coming home after building products and services at the world’s largest companies and starting up.
Second, innovation is happening in every sector. We call this a “Cambrian explosion”. Founders in India today are building across every imaginable sector from consumer brands to financial services, healthcare, space-tech, AI, semiconductors and more.
Third, many of these founders are building for global markets from day one. In 2025, 40% of new seed funded startups were building for the world from the outset. And this too is happening across sectors not just in AI but also consumer brands, educational products, advanced manufacturing, semiconductors, space-tech and more.
Fourth, the availability of venture capital has increased and public markets are open to startup IPOs. Venture funding has grown 5x over the past 12 years. There is no dearth of capital in India today for good ideas. Moreover, over the last few years, India has held the number one spot globally in terms of overall IPO volume (i.e. number of IPOs), and startup IPOs are becoming increasingly common. This gives investors a clear way to exit, which brings more capital back into the ecosystem.
Fifth, the government is a champion of startups. In recent years, regulatory reforms have made it easier to start and grow a business. Digital public infrastructure like Aadhaar and UPI has given startups a solid foundation to grow and scale. The government has also proactively opened sectors such as space and defence to private players. The space sector, in particular, has grown rapidly: in just six years since opening up to private participation in 2020, India is now home to more than 400 space-tech startups. By comparison, the US has around 900, but has been open to private players for decades.
These five forces coming together makes this the moment for India’s startups. And in fact, we believe this is just the start.
M.R.: You argue that India is much closer to an innovation breakout than many people realise. What are we missing when we look at India today?
Saurabh: We have both been closely associated with India’s startup ecosystem for several decades. For this book, we also spoke to more than 180 founders, investors, policymakers and academics across the country. People don’t often associate India with deep-tech innovation, but what we saw on the ground while researching this book truly amazed us.
Deep-tech innovation is happening across the country, and across a remarkable range of fields. ImmunoACT, a startup spun out of IIT Bombay, has developed an indigenous CAR-T cell therapy that makes advanced cancer treatment significantly more affordable. Nayam, meanwhile, has developed what it describes as the world’s first intraocular lens that can be customised after surgery, while the patient is still in hospital, delivering spectacles-free vision at the same price as a standard cataract procedure.
At IIT Kanpur, my alma mater, a team has developed an artificial heart at roughly one-seventh the cost of currently available alternatives. In space-tech, Digantara, founded by 22-year-olds, has developed what its founder calls “Google Maps for space” – technology that tracks debris and other objects in orbit. Agnikul Cosmos has built the world’s largest single-piece, 3D-printed rocket engine, dramatically simplifying rocket manufacturing. And in electric mobility, The ePlane Company has developed India’s first electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft – a cross between a drone, helicopter and small plane.
These are just a handful of examples. There are many more.
The challenge now is to scale this innovation. This is where initiatives such as the government’s recently announced ANRF, modelled on the US National Science Foundation, and the $11 billion RDI Fund, designed to catalyse private-sector investment in R&D, will play an important role.
M.R.: What role is India playing in an AI landscape currently dominated by the US and China?
Rajan: India is still at an earlier stage of its AI journey than the US and China, but it is rapidly building capabilities across the AI stack – from compute and foundation models to applications and tooling.
The biggest shift is in compute. In the first half of 2026, nearly $300 billion of planned investment in AI and compute infrastructure was announced by Indian conglomerates, global hyperscalers and local cloud providers. While this is small relative to the investment planned by leading US AI companies, it could significantly reduce one of India’s biggest constraints: access to compute.
At the model layer, India is taking a different path from the US and China. Rather than immediately attempting to build trillion-parameter frontier models, Indian AI companies are focusing on smaller, more affordable models that can address 90–95% of enterprise needs and most consumer applications. Twelve teams backed by the government’s IndiaAI Mission are building such models. Sarvam AI, for instance, has developed 30-billion- and 105-billion-parameter models and Indic-language voice models that are competing and winning in the Indian markets.
The biggest opportunity may be at the application layer. Hundreds of Indian startups are building AI products for both domestic and global markets, spanning enterprise software, voice AI, education, healthcare, commerce and entertainment. India already has more venture-funded consumer AI startups than the US!
2026 is the year that India entered the AI race, and as we have seen with other industries like digital payments and space-tech, it takes a decade for India to not go from being in the race to global leadership. We believe the same will happen in AI.
M.R. is the co-founder of Sandhill.com