Google X Inc42: Bharat AI Startups Report, 2026

India is moving from AI pilots to production-first, workflow-native systems. The prize is structural: a $126 Bn AI market by 2030 and a potential $1.7 Tn GDP impact by 2035. The moat won’t come from frontier research alone, it will come from execution: shipping, integrating, and scaling AI where work actually happens. This cycle is split: Enterprise AI is the value pool ($11 Bn → $71 Bn), while Consumer AI drives adoption ($13 Bn → $55 Bn). India is already the world’s #2 market for AI app downloads (177 Mn in 2024) — but consumer monetisation is still early (~$12 Mn, ~$0.07 per download). That conversion gap is where the next winners will be built. The 886 Mn+ internet users and 22 official languages make trust and reliability non-negotiable; products that work here can travel globally, making India a global-grade stress test. The IndiaAI Mission adds a “sovereign discount” by reducing experimentation costs through subsidised compute and a 38K+ GPU grid. 2026–2030 is the defining window: as markets consolidate, the edge will belong to teams that own workflows and earn trust at scale. This report dives into the market’s core numbers, the enterprise vs consumer divergence, the “Bharat-scale” trust bar, and how ecosystem enablers are compressing build cycles, to help founders win in the 2026–2030 window.

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