From Brain Drain To Base Camp: How Bharat1 Is Trying To Anchor AI In India

by · Inc42

SUMMARY

  • Founded by Subhashish Banerjee, Umakant Soni, and Sireesh Kupendra, Bharat1.ai is working to build an AI city in Bengaluru.
  • It aims to bring together startups, academic institutions like IITs and BITS, and large enterprises such as banks to set up teams here.
  • More than 20 startups are building out of the facility, benefiting from the network, infrastructure, mentorship, and availability of talent
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From Perplexity cofounder Aravind Srinivas and Anthropic CTO Rahul Patil to big tech giants such as Google’s Sundar Pichai and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Indian brains are driving deeptech and AI businesses in the West.  

But, India ironically lags behind countries like the US and China in terms of the number of homegrown deeptech companies. Enter Bharat1.ai, a startup trying to bridge this gap.

Founded earlier this year by Subhashish Banerjee, Umakant Soni, and Sireesh Kupendra, the company has set up an AI city in Bengaluru. In its first phase, the company has developed an AI Superpark for startups, academic institutions like IITs and BITS, and large enterprises such as banks.

The founders describe Bharat1 as a company building a ‘humanity-centric’ AI ecosystem. It has tied up with NVIDIA and a host of local and multinational foundational partners like AI research labs and academic institutions for this purpose. 

The Making Of B1 AI Superpark

In the first phase, the company has created 500,000 sq ft of AI innovation space for startups, corporates and academia. This will be the platform for the development and deployment of AI and robotics companies working on Agentic and Physical AI. “This AI Superpark paves the way for a grander and more ambitious project of launching a 70-acre AI city in future,” Banerjee said.

For pure-play AI startups, the requirements are clear — talent, ecosystem, capital, go-to-market support, and enterprise adoption. Although India has a deep talent pool, significant gaps in other areas create a bottleneck for startups. Many Indian founders end up building globally successful companies but only after relocating to the US for better access to capital and ecosystem support, pointed out the cofounder.