Artificial Intelligence is becoming a core part of how businesses operate across the globe. In India, this shift is picking up at a serious pace. With 16% of the world’s AI talent, the country is well-positioned to lead the way in AI innovation and adoption. But what will really set India apart are the people building bold, practical use cases, leaders who are not just following trends but creating them. From startups to R&D teams, more and more Indian founders and technologists are stepping up to claim their place in the global AI race.
In this listicle, we spotlight some of the top Indian leaders in AI—people who are pushing boundaries, driving economic growth and shaping the future with intelligence and creativity. From pioneering startups to transformative R&D, these leaders are building innovation that matters.
- Praveer Kochhar
Praveer Kochhar is the Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at KOGO AI, an enterprise-grade Private AI platform built for organizations that need both intelligence and control. Praveer is focused on building intelligent AI agents for cross-enterprise use cases through private AI architectures that run on-prem, hybrid, or secure cloud environments. His team also built KOGO OS — a low-to-no-code platform — to help developers and businesses create custom AI agents.
Praveer’s larger goal is to make AI adoption easier across industries, especially in critical sectors like healthcare, defense, and BFSI, where concerns around data sensitivity still thrive. With the power of private AI, he’s helping these sectors innovate with confidence. KOGO has also partnered with Tech Mahindra and Qualcomm to build secure, high-performance private AI frameworks, combining enterprise transformation capabilities with cutting-edge AI infrastructure to meet global compliance and scalability needs.
- Adarsh Natarajan
Adarsh Natarajan is the Founder and CEO of Aindra Systems, a Bengaluru-based startup working at the intersection of artificial intelligence and healthcare. What started as an effort to solve subsidy leakages in government schemes has evolved into a mission to use AI for social impact. Aindra builds products in the domain of computer vision, with a focus on computational pathology and point-of-care cancer diagnostics.
One of Aindra’s key innovations is an AI-powered cervical cancer screening platform. Designed to be affordable and portable, it enables early detection of cancer and boosts productivity for pathologists by automating deep learning analysis. With India accounting for nearly a third of global cervical cancer cases, Adarsh’s vision is to enable mass screening across the country. By using AI to democratize healthcare, Aindra is helping bring timely, life-saving diagnostics to millions of women in at-risk communities.
- Pratik Desai
Pratik Desai is the founder of KissanAI, a startup focused on building AI-powered tools for Indian farmers. Coming from an agricultural family and based in the US, Pratik combines domain knowledge with deep AI/ML expertise to solve real challenges in Indian agriculture. His earlier work includes using generative AI to create 20,000 stock images within a month of Stable Diffusion’s release and developing automated labeling tools.
KissanGPT, one of his standout innovations, offers farmers voice-based access to agricultural information in Indian languages—something existing solutions lack. With a rich and focused dataset, the tool is designed to go beyond fragmented advice and actually solve farmers’ daily information gaps. Pratik’s goal is simple but impactful: make AI useful and accessible to farmers, not just to push products, but to truly empower them through technology.
- Pratyush Kumar
Pratyush Kumar is the co-founder of Sarvam AI, a company working to build India’s first sovereign foundational AI model—a 70-billion-parameter system designed to be multilingual, multimodal, and globally competitive. What sets Sarvam apart is its focus on all 22 scheduled Indian languages and a governance model that ensures the system is trusted, secure, and usable for both public and commercial applications.
Under Pratyush’s leadership, Sarvam is developing this large language model with a strong commitment to citizen privacy, leveraging only public data while ensuring no personal or sensitive information is used. The startup has been selected under the IndiaAI Mission to lead this critical national initiative, placing Pratyush at the forefront of building AI infrastructure that’s truly Indian at its core.
- Prashant Warier
Prashant Warier is the Co-founder and CEO of Qure.ai, a healthtech startup using deep learning to interpret CT scans, X-rays, and MRIs, enabling faster, more accurate diagnoses. Qure.ai is designed to support radiologists in urban centers and provide automated diagnostic support in rural areas where such expertise is often unavailable.
Prashant’s personal journey—shaped by his father’s misdiagnosis—fueled his drive to improve diagnostic accuracy and accessibility. Under his leadership, Qure.ai is working to bridge gaps in healthcare delivery, making high-quality diagnostic services more accessible and equitable. By focusing on transparency, clinical validation, and regulatory compliance, Qure.ai is helping build trust in AI-powered healthcare.
- Milan Sharma
Milan Sharma is the Co-founder and CEO of Intello Labs, an AI-driven startup working to digitize food quality and reduce food loss across the agricultural supply chain. With one-third of the world’s food wasted every year, mostly at early stages, Intello Labs uses AI and machine learning to bring transparency and efficiency to food quality assessment.
Milan’s mission is simple: to build a world with zero food loss and waste. Guided by the belief that impact comes before scale, he focuses on building a team passionate about solving real-world problems with technology that delivers meaningful results.
- Jo Aggarwal
Jo Aggarwal is the Founder and CEO of Wysa, an AI-powered mental health platform that’s making support accessible, immediate, and stigma-free. Built as an emotionally intelligent chatbot, Wysa offers evidence-based techniques for anxiety, grief, low mood, and more, right when people need it. So far, it’s been used by over a million people across 30 countries and has already helped save lives.
Driven by the belief that the world is facing a mental health crisis with no backup on the way, Jo is focused on putting a “fire extinguisher in every pocket.” She’s also partnering with UNICEF’s YuWaah initiative to bring digital-first mental health support and life skills to young people from vulnerable communities—meeting them where they are, and when it matters most.
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