Accel's Swaroop: Quantum Computing, Robotics will Crown Next Decade of Tech

India does not have an artificial intelligence (AI) talent problem. It has a go-to-market problem. Over the past two years, there has been a visible rise in Indian founders building serious AI products across application layers, infrastructure and open source. The quality of engineering is no longer the question. What remains unresolved is differentiation, distribution and belief.

And that gap matters more than we are willing to admit.

At the application layer, many AI products struggle to stand apart. From a buyer’s perspective, offerings often blur together, with similar benchmarks, comparable demos and overlapping claims. With standards still evolving, differentiation collapses into feature comparison.

This is compounded by a demand reality that rarely gets discussed. Large Indian enterprises remain cautious in their AI spending. Pilots are common. Scaled deployments are not. Even strong products face long sales cycles and limited pricing power.

The result is frustration, not because the technology is weak, but because the market is still finding its footing.

Marketing Issues

Several Indian founders are building technically impressive AI infrastructure and developer-first products. The constraint is not depth, but distribution. Unlike earlier software-as-a-service cycles, AI infrastructure adoption depends heavily on developers, reached through content, community and credibility rather than traditional enterprise sales.

This is where many teams struggle. Open-source companies, in particular, find product marketing unintuitive. They optimise for adoption, but not always for narrative. Without a clear articulation of why the product matters beyond how it works, momentum stalls.

Indian founders are exceptional engineers. But engineering excellence alone does not create belief.

Too often, product conversations remain anchored in incremental gains such as better accuracy, lower latency and marginal performance improvements. These advances matter, but they are not the story.

International founders tend to anchor their pitch in outcomes, how workflows change, how industries reset and how human effort is reallocated.

The absence of that framing weakens positioning. It affects fundraising, hiring, customer trust and eventually market access. Products get evaluated as tools, not movements. This narrative gap becomes more pronounced when Indian companies attempt to enter the US market.

Even well-funded teams struggle to land early customers. Generic claims about changing the world do not resonate when buyers expect clarity, confidence and category leadership. Without a sharp point of view, capital alone does not unlock distribution.

Clearer Not Louder

There is also a structural reality founders must navigate carefully. An Indian AI company may raise a few million dollars while a comparable US start-up raises tens or hundreds of millions. This is not a complaint, it is context. The gap constrains speed, experimentation and sustained go-to-market investment.

A pragmatic approach increasingly seen to work is sequential. Build in India, raise from Indian venture capital (VC), establish product-market clarity and then expand into the US with intent rather than assumption.

There are early signs of strategic support that deserve attention. Recent interactions with the Prime Minister’s Office have included discussions around opening access to specific global markets for Indian technology companies, in ways that prioritise domestic builders.

These are not silver bullets, but meaningful green shoots. The opportunity lies in aligning founder ambition, private capital and selective government enablement without turning the conversation into one of deficit or grievance.

India does not need louder AI narratives. It needs clearer ones. Founders must invest as much in articulation as in architecture, in category definition, conviction and in explaining why their product changes outcomes, not just metrics. Investors and ecosystem players have a role to play here, helping teams translate technical depth into global relevance.

If India’s AI decade is to be realised, it will not be won only in labs or repositories. It will be won in how confidently Indian companies tell their story and how credibly they deliver on it.

Playing Catch Up

This discussion is incomplete without pointing out we are trying to play catch up. We as an ecosystem—VCs, government, entrepreneurs and corporates—need to upskill and invest in areas of the future. This is an important lesson we need to learn so that history doesn’t repeat itself. Areas of quantum computing and robotics will crown the next decade of tech. And we need to be prepared for this.

We have a good National Quantum Mission. However, in this category the total investments in India space are a tiny fraction of what a single company like Google or Microsoft are spending in their annual budgets. This is one of those technologies where once a ChatGPT/Transformers moment happens, the whole world will inflect and we need to be ready to catch the wave or we will be left behind yet again.

A more imminent worry is that in robotics, we are significantly behind a number of countries. There is talent in India, smart founders are trying to build humanoids and quadruped robots to assist in factories, home and defence. However, to be successful robotics needs the intersection of not just AI and semiconductors but also precision manufacturing. The actuators are all imported in India. We are falling behind.

Indian corporates need to amp up their R&D budgets and try to become customers of Indian robotic start-ups and robotic labs—to support this innovation and as well as to remain competitive at a global scale. If robotics innovation in the factories takes hold in the world, and our factories are not planned for this, history will repeat itself. We are under threat from losing our IT jobs from AI, and we will be under threat from losing our manufacturing jobs from robotics.

(The writer is partner, Accel)