AI Startups To Watch: 5 Indian AI Startups That Caught Our Eye In December

The year 2025 has reshaped the trajectory of India’s SaaS ecosystem, thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), which has moved from being a mere buzzword to empowering how people work.

No longer limited to pilots or prototypes, AI is now compressing timelines, reducing human dependency and unlocking new layers of productivity across sectors. 

Unlike previous phases of digitisation, which were mostly limited to accessing information, the ongoing AI wave is about decision-making and autonomy. 

In this new reality, AI is rapidly shifting from a nice-to-have differentiator to a survival layer, and early adopters stand to win with leaner operations, while laggards risk becoming obsolete.  

At the centre of this shift sits India’s nascent yet rapidly maturing agentic AI ecosystem that is making AI usable and trustworthy for businesses. The market is already on an upward trajectory, with India’s agentic AI segment projected to surge to more than $3.5 Bn by 2030, helped by enterprises accelerating automation plans.

Against this backdrop, let’s set the stage for the third edition of “5 AI Startups To Watch” — Inc42’s newest series where every month we spotlight five early stage Indian AI startups on the path to disrupting the market.   

This month’s edition features Dalvoy AI, Molecule AI, PredCo, Riverline AI, and Vishwa AI, spanning sectors from healthcare to fintech and edtech.

Now, without further ado, let’s jump right into the December 2025 edition of AI Startups To Watch.

Editor’s Note: The list below is not a ranking but rather a window into ventures that have caught our eye this month.

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Dalvoy | AI-Powered UPSC Preparation Platform

Every year, 10–13 Lakh Indians sit for the UPSC civil services exam, but only around 1,000 secure a place. Despite the odds, aspirants put in immense effort, often juggling multiple study methods to cover the syllabus where almost anything can be asked.

Founded in 2024 by IIT Delhi alumnus Ritik Agrawal and Akash Sharma, Dalvoy uses GenAI to make UPSC preparation more effective and accessible. 

The platform focusses on candidates who have cleared prelims and are preparing for mains. Its AI agent evaluates written answers using training data from 1,000+ toppers’ answer sheets and has been fine-tuned by over 100 evaluators and past mains qualifiers.

Dalvoy’s UPSC GPT sources past papers, summarises current affairs, generates mock tests and helps aspirants keep track of relevant topics. Free users get one mock test and limited access, while premium users receive up to 100 daily conversations, 10 tests and full access to mocks and previous-year papers.

Priced from INR 399 to INR 999, Dalvoy has so far attracted over 27,000 users, including 5,000 paid users, a strong start in a large and underserved UPSC test-prep market.

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Molecule AI | Accelerating Drug Discovery With AI

The process of early stage drug discovery remains a significant challenge in biopharma. Traditional lab research is slow and expensive because scientists often test thousands of chemical compounds through trial and error, and most of them don’t work out before a single promising drug candidate finally emerges.

Founded in 2023 by Saurabh Singal and Neeta Singal, Molecule AI is leveraging GenAI to fundamentally reimagine the drug discovery process. 

What’s In The Stack? Molecule AI’s main platform, MoleculeGEN, uses AI to design new molecules on a computer, enabling the rapid identification of candidates that can target specific diseases. MoleculeGEN also accelerates the pre-clinical pipeline by rapidly generating and evaluating virtual drug candidates against critical properties before any lab work begins. The platform screens for key pharmacological criteria that include:

• Target Specificity: Will the molecule effectively bind to the disease protein?
• Pharmacokinetics: Will it reach the right part of the body and remain stable?
• Safety Profile: Is it likely to be safe for human use?

The startup operates within the rapidly expanding Indian AI-in-genomics market, which is expected to breach the $506.4 Mn mark by 2030.

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PredCo | Bringing Real-Time Intelligence To Factory Floors

Machine breakdowns, safety issues and inventory delays regularly disrupt industrial manufacturing and plant operations. Plus, a lack of a centralised, real-time view across disparate systems — from legacy equipment to modern sensors — makes it difficult for managers to anticipate problems, leading to unplanned downtime, high maintenance costs, and compromised operational efficiency.

Enabling Centralised Oversight Of OPs: PredCo is addressing this issue by utilising AI to create a seamless, end-to-end management layer for industrial facilities. The startup’s platform provides managers with a unified view across all their machines and systems. The centralised oversight of operations enables users to predict challenges more efficiently, ensuring proactive decision-making.

A Full-Stack Operational Intelligence Platform: PredCo’s platform integrates various AI and digital twin technologies to deliver:

• Predictive Maintenance: Uses sensor data and machine learning to forecast when critical equipment is likely to fail, allowing for maintenance to be scheduled precisely before a breakdown.
• Digital Twins: Creates virtual, high-fidelity copies of physical assets to simulate performance, test new operating conditions, and optimise efficiency without risking damage to the real equipment.
• Camera-Based Inspection: Deploys computer vision to spot product defects in real time during the manufacturing process, ensuring quality control.
• Real-Time Tracking: Tracks assets, inventory, and safety compliance across the plant floor, ensuring seamless material flow and accident prevention.

PredCo targets the industrial AI and manufacturing compliance market, estimated at $50 Bn globally, with India’s manufacturing digitisation opportunity estimated at $20 Bn.

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Riverline AI | Empathetic AI Loan Recovery Agents

With unsecured lending rising quickly, the debt collection that follows often results in troubling human stories. Lenders face high operational costs and growing non-performing loans (NPLs), while borrowers are subjected to aggressive, outdated recovery methods that erode trust and offer little assistance in helping them regain financial stability.

Founded in 2023 by Ankit Sanghvi, Jayanth Krishnaprakash, and Abhishek Gupta, Riverline AI is solving this with AI-powered debt counsellors. Its platform aims to replace traditional call centres with a counselling layer for distressed borrowers.

High On EQ: Riverline’s AI agents manage the end-to-end debt recovery workflow with a focus on compliance and borrower upliftment. The platform leverages advanced AI memory systems and multilingual support for:

• Personalised Outreach: The AI determines the right channel (WhatsApp, email, or voice call), time, and tone for each borrower, ensuring empathetic and compliant communication.
• Negotiation & Resolution: The agents analyse the borrower’s history and behaviour to propose viable repayment plans, helping them move toward creditworthy decisions.

For lenders, the platform provides complete transparency and real-time insights into the collection funnel, enhancing credit risk visibility. 

The Bengaluru-based startup operates in the Indian debt-collection software market to reach $456.30 Mn by 2033, exhibiting a CAGR of 10.48% during 2025-2033.

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Vishwa AI | Automating Due Diligence For Finance And Lending

Credit risk teams and finance departments at enterprises and fintechs still rely heavily on manual data extraction, Excel-based analysis and fragmented workflows for their internal processes. This makes underwriting, invoice processing and document validation painfully slow, error-prone and difficult to scale.

Founded in 2023 by Sai Sharan and Mohit Kumar, Bengaluru-based Vishwa AI is plugging this gap by automating data extraction and risk assessment workflows. 

Actionable AI: Vishwa is building an AI-powered platform that transforms document-intensive processes into automated, structured workflows. The bootstrapped startup offers two flagship products – DocsAI and LendingAI. The startup claims that DocsAI can extract data from invoices, contracts and financial statements with 99% accuracy, while integrating seamlessly with over 100 tools, including QuickBooks, Zoho Books and SAP. 

Empowering NBFCs: Its other product, LendingAI, leverages agentic AI frameworks to help non-banking lenders automate underwriting, financial data extraction, covenant monitoring and credit report generation in a matter of minutes. 

Positioning itself as the no-code, AI layer for document automation, Vishwa AI operates in the broader Indian SaaS market, which is projected to become a $50 Bn opportunity by 2030.

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[Edited by: Shishir Parasher]