Can India Capitalise On The AI Homecoming?

India is attracting AI researchers back from global labs, but can its growing startup ecosystem, infrastructure and investor appetite turn returning talent into globally competitive AI companies?

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For decades, Indian engineers and researchers moved to Silicon Valley, joining global technology companies and contributing to products and research that shaped the industry. Now, the tides are turning. Indian talent with experience at some of the world’s most influential AI labs is making its way back home to build startups and research organisations of its own.

This emerging trend could signal a new wave of reverse brain drain. But what has changed to make India a more credible place to build AI companies for those who have worked at the world’s leading research labs? And why is this happening now? Let’s ponder in this edition of The AI Shift…

A Land Of Opportunities

The shift is being driven by a combination of entrepreneurial ambition and a changing Indian AI ecosystem. Experienced researchers are beginning to see an opportunity to build companies around their own research agendas, while India’s growing startup landscape and emerging AI infrastructure are making that ambition more achievable.

Shyamal Hitesh Anadkat, a former OpenAI researcher who returned to India to build Empirical Machines, a startup focused on accelerating scientific discovery, pointed to this change in an interview with Financial Express. 

He cited growing momentum in the startup ecosystem, the emergence of companies such as Sarvam AI, and a stronger appetite for risk among researchers and founders. The sense that more talent was beginning to rally around India’s AI opportunity had also become an important factor.

Parth Sarthi, cofounder of Chariot, offers another perspective. After completing his masters from Stanford University, Sarthi joined Contextual AI and later Google DeepMind as a research engineer. His work at DeepMind included multimodal reasoning for Gemini Deep Thinking, involving systems that reason across text, numbers and images.

Parth Sarthi, cofounder of Chariot, offers another perspective. After completing his masters from Stanford........

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