The rapid adoption of technology in India is driving a surge in demand for AI solutions across sectors like finance, education, healthcare, and agriculture. AI is revolutionising these industries by making services more efficient, personalised, and accessible. This growing dependence on AI has created a fertile ground for innovation, propelling India’s emergence as a global hub for AI startups. With over 6,200 AI startups operating in the country, India offers a dynamic and challenging landscape for entrepreneurs seeking to make a meaningful impact.
Fuelling AI Innovation: India’s Strategic Investment
Earlier this year, the government allocated USD 1.3 billion for the India AI Mission, solidifying its commitment to AI. This comprehensive program is designed to catalyse the AI innovation ecosystem within the country. At the heart of this ecosystem’s development lies the expansion of compute infrastructure, a critical resource for AI startups. By providing access to powerful computing resources, the India AI Mission is empowering startups to scale their solutions and compete on a global level.
Beyond infrastructure, the initiative focuses on fostering collaborations between academia, industry, and startups to drive R&D. By creating a supportive environment that promotes knowledge sharing and resource accessibility, the India AI Mission aims to position India as a leader in the AI landscape.
A Spotlight on Indian Startups
Driving Industry Innovation
Healthcare. India’s vibrant AI startup ecosystem is driving innovation in healthcare, with companies leveraging AI to address critical challenges and improve patient outcomes.
- Cancer-Focused AI Startups. Several startups are revolutionising cancer care with AI-driven innovations. Niramai, globally recognised for its innovation, uses AI and thermal imaging for early breast cancer detection, particularly effective in younger women and dense breast tissue. Onward Assist provides predictive analytics for oncology, helping oncologists manage patient data and improve the accuracy of cancer care decisions. Similarly, Atom360 focuses on oral cancer screening with an AI-powered app that offers quick, affordable access to critical information, enhancing oral healthcare in underserved areas.
- AI-Driven Diagnostic Solutions. AI is significantly advancing diagnostics, enhancing accuracy, and reducing misdiagnosis. SigTuple develops AI-driven diagnostic solutions for medical imaging and pathology, improving accuracy and efficiency in disease detection. Endimension Technology, incubated at IIT Bombay, develops algorithms for detecting abnormalities in medical scans, aiming to reduce misdiagnosis and radiologist workload. Tricog Health delivers AI solutions for rapid heart attack diagnosis, reducing diagnosis time and improving outcomes, especially in underserved regions.
Financial Services. Fintechs have been at the forefront of AI-led innovations, offering innovative solutions for insurance, lending, and microfinance. Artivatic uses AI to transform traditional insurance systems into digital, personalised offerings, making coverage more accessible and affordable for a broader range of consumers. ZestMoney leverages AI for digital lending, providing credit to individuals without a credit history through easy EMI plans, and enhancing financial access. Meanwhile, mPokket offers instant micro-loans to students and young professionals, addressing short-term financial needs with flexible loan options and minimal documentation.
Other Industries. Beyond healthcare and financial services, AI startups are driving innovation across various industries, tackling critical challenges. Entropik uses AI to analyse human emotions and behaviour, helping businesses gain deeper insights into consumer preferences for market research and optimising user experiences. In agriculture, Intello Labs applies AI and computer vision to assess the quality of fresh produce, reducing food waste and improving supply chain efficiency. Similarly, AgNext enhances food value chains by offering AI-driven, real-time quality assessments through its SaaS platform, promoting safety and transparency in agribusiness.
Transforming Businesses
Technology for Security & Fraud. AI startups are offering innovative solutions tailored to organisations’ needs. SpoofSense combats deepfakes and identity fraud with advanced facial liveness detection, ensuring secure user verification by distinguishing between real users and spoofed images. Eagle Eye Networks provides cloud-based video surveillance solutions, using AI to offer real-time monitoring and analytics. In the e-commerce space, ThirdWatch uses AI to detect and prevent fraud in real-time by analysing user behaviour and transaction patterns, reducing financial losses for online retailers.
Tech Development. AI startups are empowering organisations to accelerate innovation and enhance productivity. Haptik helps businesses build intelligent virtual assistants, powering chatbots and voice bots across industries to improve customer engagement. DhiWise automates the development process, enabling faster app creation by converting designs into code. Additionally, Fluid AI provides advanced AI solutions like predictive analytics and natural language processing for sectors like finance, retail, and healthcare. Mihup enhances contact centre performance with its conversation intelligence platform, while Yellow.ai enables enterprises to automate customer engagement through its GenAI-powered platform, creating seamless and scalable customer service experiences.
Empowering People
AI startups are empowering individuals by providing personalised services that enhance learning, creativity, and financial management. SuperKalam and ZuAI offer students tailored learning experiences, using AI to create interactive lessons and assessments that adapt to individual learning styles, improving student engagement and outcomes. For creative professionals, Mugafi combines AI with human mentoring to assist writers in generating ideas and developing scripts, enabling them to create intellectual property with greater efficiency. Wright Research empowers individuals to make informed financial decisions through AI-powered investment advice, while Vahan simplifies job searches for blue-collar workers by using AI to match candidates with suitable employment opportunities via WhatsApp.
Promoting ESG
AI startups are driving meaningful change by optimising processes and creating economic opportunities. Ossus Biorenewables enhances biofuel production through AI, reducing waste and increasing efficiency in renewable energy generation, while Ishitva Robotic Systems promotes sustainability by automating waste sorting and recycling, contributing to a more efficient and circular economy. Karya connects rural workers with digital tasks, offering fair wages and skills development by matching them to tasks suited to their abilities using machine learning. In agriculture, KissanAI helps farmers improve crop yields and manage resources effectively through personalised, data-driven recommendations. ElasticRun improves last-mile delivery logistics in rural areas, enabling businesses to reach underserved markets.
Conclusion
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang noted India’s potential to become the “largest exporter of AI,” signalling vast global opportunities. India’s AI startups are at the forefront of innovation but face hurdles such as fierce competition for skilled talent, navigating complex regulations, and securing funding. With strategic focus on these challenges and the backing of initiatives like Digital India and Startup India, India’s AI ecosystem can seize emerging market opportunities, accelerate tech advancements, and make a substantial impact on the global AI landscape.
Trust in the Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI) industry is critical – and this amplifies the value of stolen data and fuels the motivation of malicious actors. Ransomware attacks continue to escalate, underscoring the need for fortified backup, encryption, and intrusion prevention systems. Similarly, phishing schemes have become increasingly sophisticated, placing a burden on BFSI cyber teams to educate employees, inform customers, deploy multifactor authentication, and implement fraud detection systems. While BFSI organisations work to fortify their defences, intruders continually find new avenues for profit – cyber protection is a high-stakes game of technological cat and mouse!
Some of these challenges inherent to the industry include the rise of cryptojacking – the unauthorised use of a BFSI company’s extensive computational resources for cryptocurrency mining.
Building Trust Amidst Expanding Threat Landscape
BFSI organisations face increasing complexity in their IT landscapes. Amidst initiatives like robo-advisory, point-of-sale lending, and personalised engagements – often facilitated by cloud-based fintech providers – they encounter new intricacies. As guest access extends to bank branches and IoT devices proliferate in public settings, vulnerabilities can emerge unexpectedly. Threats may arise from diverse origins, including misconfigured ATMs, unattended security cameras, or even asset trackers. Ensuring security and maintaining customer trust requires BFSI organisations to deploy automated and intelligent security systems to respond to emerging new threats.
Ecosystm research finds that nearly 70% of BFSI organisations have the intention of adopting AI and automation for security operations, over the next two years. But the reality is that adoption is still fairly nascent. Their top cyber focus areas remain data security, risk and compliance management, and application security.
Addressing Alert Fatigue and Control Challenges
According to Ecosystm research, 50% of BFSI organisations use more than 50 security tools to secure their infrastructure – and these are only the known tools. Cyber leaders are not only challenged with finding, assessing, and deploying the right tools, they are also challenged with managing them. Management challenges include a lack of centralised control across assets and applications and handling a high volume of security events and false positives.
Software updates and patches within the IT environment are crucial for security operations to identify and address potential vulnerabilities. Management of the IT environment should be paired with greater automation – event correlation, patching, and access management can all be improved through reduced manual processes.
Security operations teams must contend with the thousands of alerts that they receive each day. As a result, security analysts suffer from alert fatigue and struggle to recognise critical issues and novel threats. There is an urgency to deploy solutions that can help to reduce noise. For many organisations, an AI-augmented security team could de-prioritise 90% of alerts and focus on genuine risks.
Taken a step further, tools like AIOps can not only prioritise alerts but also respond to them. Directing issues to the appropriate people, recommending actions that can be taken by operators directly in a collaboration tool, and rules-based workflows performed automatically are already possible. Additionally, by evaluating past failures and successes, AIOps can learn over time which events are likely to become critical and how to respond to them. This brings us closer to the dream of NoOps, where security operations are completely automated.
Threat Intelligence and Visibility for a Proactive Cyber Approach
New forms of ransomware, phishing schemes, and unidentified vulnerabilities in cloud are emerging to exploit the growing attack surface of financial services organisations. Security operations teams in the BFSI sector spend most of their resources dealing with incoming alerts, leaving them with little time to proactively investigate new threats. It is evident that organisations require a partner that has the scale to maintain a data lake of threats identified by a broad range of customers even within the same industry. For greater predictive capabilities, threat intelligence should be based on research carried out on the dark web to improve situational awareness. These insights can help security operations teams to prepare for future attacks. Regular reporting to keep CIOs and CISOs informed of the changing threat landscape can also ease the mind of executives.
To ensure services can be delivered securely, BFSI organisations require additional visibility of traffic on their networks. The ability to not only inspect traffic as it passes through the firewall but to see activity within the network is critical in these increasingly complex environments. Network traffic anomaly detection uses machine learning to recognise typical traffic patterns and generates alerts for abnormal activity, such as privilege escalation or container escape. The growing acceptance of BYOD has also made device visibility more complex. By employing AI and adopting a zero-trust approach, devices can be profiled and granted appropriate access automatically. Network operators gain visibility of unknown devices and can easily enforce policies on a segmented network.
Intelligent Cyber Strategies
Here is what BFSI CISOs should prioritise to build a cyber resilient organisation.
Automation. The volume of incoming threats has grown beyond the capability of human operators to investigate manually. Increase the level of automation in your SOC to minimise the routine burden on the security operations team and allow them to focus on high-risk threats.
Cyberattack simulation exercises. Many security teams are too busy dealing with day-to-day operations to perform simulation exercises. However, they are a vital component of response planning. Organisation-wide exercises – that include security, IT operations, and communications teams – should be conducted regularly.
An AIOps topology map. Identify where you have reliable data sources that could be analysed by AIOps. Then select a domain by assessing the present level of observability and automation, IT skills gap, frequency of threats, and business criticality. As you add additional domains and the system learns, the value you realise from AIOps will grow.
A trusted intelligence partner. Extend your security operations team by working with a partner that can provide threat intelligence unattainable to most individual organisations. Threat intelligence providers can pool insights gathered from a diversity of client engagements and dedicated researchers. By leveraging the experience of a partner, BFSI organisations can better plan for how they will respond to inevitable breaches.
Conclusion
An effective cybersecurity strategy demands a comprehensive approach that incorporates technology, education, and policies while nurturing a culture of security awareness throughout the organisation. CISOs face the daunting task of safeguarding their organisations against relentless cyber intrusion attempts by cybercriminals, who often leverage cutting-edge automated intrusion technologies.
To maintain an advantage over these threats, cybersecurity teams must have access to continuous threat intelligence; automation will be essential in addressing the shortage of security expertise and managing the overwhelming volume and frequency of security events. Collaborating with a specialised partner possessing both scale and experience is often the answer for organisations that want to augment their cybersecurity teams with intelligent, automated agents capable of swiftly
