Prime Minister Narendra Modi chaired a roundtable with Indian AI start-ups at his residence at 7, Lok Kalyan Marg. The interaction was held ahead of the India AI Impact Summit 2026 and included 12 start-ups that have qualified under the Foundation Model Pillar of the summit. These start-ups presented their ideas and work across diverse areas such as Indian language foundation models, multilingual LLMs, speech-to-text, text-to-audio, text-to-video, 3D content for e-commerce and marketing, engineering simulations, material research, advanced analytics, healthcare diagnostics, and medical research.
The start-ups commended India’s strong commitment to advancing the artificial intelligence ecosystem and highlighted the rapid growth and vast future potential of the AI sector. They observed that the centre of gravity of AI innovation and deployment is beginning to shift towards India, making the country a robust and enabling environment for AI development on the global stage.
During the meeting, the Prime Minister emphasised that AI start-ups and entrepreneurs are co-architects of India’s future, with immense capacity for both innovation and large-scale implementation. He highlighted the importance of India presenting a unique AI model that reflects the spirit of “Made in India, Made for the World” and stressed that Indian AI models should promote local and indigenous content and regional languages.
Shri Modi further underscored the need for AI models to be ethical, unbiased, transparent, and based on data privacy principles. He encouraged start-ups to pursue global leadership from India, promoting affordable, inclusive, and frugal AI innovation internationally. The meeting also highlighted India’s role in hosting the India AI Impact Summit, through which the country aims to strengthen its position in the global technology sector.
The roundtable was attended by CEOs, heads, and representatives of Indian AI start-ups including Avataar, BharatGen, Fractal, Gan, Genloop, Gnani, Intellihealth, Sarvam, Shodh AI, Soket AI, Tech Mahindra, and Zenteiq. Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Shri Ashwini Vaishnaw and Minister of State Shri Jitin Prasada were also present.
