Companies and brands.
Two engineers from Lucknow spent eight years building the ingredients that go inside other people's products — sweeteners, yeast proteins, fibres. In July 2026 they raised ₹230 crore to scale it.
Frontier AI labs need expert humans to grade, correct and stress-test their models. Deccan AI, founded in 2023, built a network of over a million contributors — students, domain experts and PhDs — largely in India, and sells that work to Google DeepMind and Snowflake.
The man who built India's largest data centre company did it again, for AI. Founded in 2023, Neysa now runs 20,000+ GPUs across Mumbai and Hyderabad — close to 30% of India's high-end AI compute — backed by a Blackstone-led raise of up to $1.2 billion.
Two engineers in Bengaluru got tired of rebuilding the same plumbing for every AI app, so they built it once and sold it to everyone. Three years and $18 million later, Palo Alto Networks bought the company.
A four-year-old Bengaluru startup trying to do the hardest thing in spaceflight: build a fully reusable medium-lift rocket. $20.5 million raised, two engines of its own design, and a demonstration flight targeted for late 2027.
Founded in 1945 to import two- and three-wheelers, Bajaj now builds them for the world — the third-largest motorcycle maker anywhere, the largest three-wheeler maker, and in FY2026 the first year it crossed five million units.
It started in 1945 as a steel trading firm called Mahindra & Mohammed. When Mohammed left for Pakistan, the family couldn't afford to reprint stationery reading 'M&M' — so they became Mahindra & Mahindra. Today it is India's largest SUV maker and the world's largest tractor manufacturer by volume.
Founded in 1940 to assemble aeroplanes under licence, HAL now designs India's fighter jets and helicopters — Tejas, Dhruv, Prachand — from 21 manufacturing divisions and 11 R&D centres, with an order book of roughly ₹2.54 lakh crore.
The world's oldest motorcycle brand still in continuous production — born in Redditch in 1901, rebuilt in Madras from 1955, and now shipping over 1.22 million motorcycles a year from four Tamil Nadu plants to riders in 80+ countries.
