10-08-2025
Prosus bets on India's next startup wave—everyday AI
Dutch investing giant Prosus NV's venture capital arm is training its sights in India on a specific kind of artificial intelligence startup—those developing user-facing AI tools and services.
In its latest annual report, Prosus said the next wave of value from AI would come from the application layer, 'where AI is embedded into business workflows". In other words: AI-first startups.
Prosus recently invested in two Indian AI startups geared towards the application layer: Arivihan, an AI-driven learning platform, and CodeKarma, a productivity tool for software developers.
'I think the Indian market is very large. There are over 200 million annual shoppers and 500 million people have access to the internet. A playground at that scale isn't available anywhere else in the world," Dhruv Gupta, investor at Prosus, told Mint in an interview.
Prosus led Arivihan's $4.2 million pre-Series A fundraising round alongside Accel and GSF Ventures in July—its first edtech investment in India since it wrote off its $530 million investment in Byju's in June last year.
The Indore-based Arivihan's AI-driven learning platform offers coaching for school students through a mobile app, focusing on tier-2 cities and beyond.
Last week, the Dutch firm, alongside Accel and Xeed Ventures, co-led Bengaluru-based CodeKarma's $2.5 million pre-seed fundraise, with AI-focused SenseAI Ventures and Stargazer Ventures participating.
Prosus, which had over $152 billion of assets in 2024, previously invested in US-headquartered Ema Unlimited, an 'universal AI' employee startup founded by Surojit Chatterjee, who sits on ecommerce firm Meesho's board of directors and was a senior vice president and head of product at Flipkart.
The venture capital firm has also invested in Bengaluru-based SpotDraft, which automates the contract lifecycle management system.
Prosus's other AI application investments globally include which provides AI-powered software solutions to e-commerce businesses, and Nexad, which is building an AI-native advertising system.
Accel, Lightspeed India, and PeakXV Partners, too, have been evaluating more application-layer AI startups this year.
'The sheer diversity that India sees in terms of languages (and) cultural context, offers stress testing to models in the market. In that sense, the application layer offers a much richer set of opportunities for founders to keep building in," said Gupta.
Prosus has also invested in companies operating in the middleware layer of AI, which acts as a bridge between AI applications and models or services.
In May, the VC firm invested an undisclosed sum in Deccan AI, a Palo Alto-based startup founded by a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. The starup creates high-quality datasets for AI model training and evaluation. While Deccan AI's top executives are in the US, a majority of its workforce is in India, according to the startup's LinkedIn page.
CodeKarma too straddles the middleware layer of AI. 'The company lies somewhere in the middle, and that highlights how you can't exactly put companies into buckets right now," Gupta said.
'The potential for AI applications in India is immense, given the digital transformation journey many enterprises have undertaken, though we don't have a specific figure for the India market," said Anushree Verma, senior director analyst at technology consulting firm Gartner.
Sharper focus, uniquely Indian
At the core of Prosus's decision to invest in Indian AI startups is that the founders of these companies are building products unique to the country.
'Some of the business models coming out of (India), you won't find them in the West. If there is a problem which is deeply Indian, is there a founder who can take a shot at solving the problem? That is where our investment thesis tries to hone in on," Gupta said.
Prosus will continue with its focus on lifestyle and consumer startups in India, particularly companies that are working on personalising edtech, content generation, and commerce.
'We feel that there could be a horizontal layer on top of everyday commercial applications, which can… become your go-to for all your daily commercial activities," said Gupta.
Prosus's India portfolio includes e-commerce platform Meesho, ride-hailing company Rapido, and food-delivery and quick-commerce provider Swiggy.
In 2024-25, Prosus deployed $400 million in capital across 40 investments globally. Of the capital deployed, $88 million went towards AI-related investments. In this fiscal year as well, the firm remains 'focused on early-stage opportunities and supported existing portfolio companies across all regions", it said in its annual report.
In fact, Prosus is quite bullish on agentic AI—self-learning systems that can learn and operate on their own with little-to-no human interference.
In a report co-authored with a startup data intelligence provider, Prosus highlighted that agentic AI startups attracted $2.8 billion in VC funding globally. The technology is expected to account for 10% of all AI funding in 2025, hitting an estimated $6.7 billion by the end of the year, it said.
Indian VCs, too, have tapped into the trend. SiftHub, and CoRover raised money for their agentic AI efforts last year. This year, Atomicwork raised $25 million in a Series A fundraising round, roping in influential US investor Khosla Ventures to its capitalisation table.
Gartner predicts that by 2030, up to 50% of enterprise application software offerings will include some agentic AI features, up from less than 5% in 2025.
