India Bolsters AI Development: Eight Firms Selected for Phase 2 of IndiaAI Mission

India Expands AI Capabilities with New Selections

The Indian government has taken a significant step forward in its artificial intelligence (AI) ambitions by announcing the selection of eight firms for the second phase of its IndiaAI Mission. This announcement, made at the AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi, marks a crucial expansion of India's efforts to develop indigenous foundational AI models 1

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Selected Companies and Their Contributions

The newly selected companies include BharatGen, Tech Mahindra, Fractal, Avataar.ai, ZenteiQ.ai, Genloop, NeuroDX (IntelliHealth), and Shodh AI 3

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. These firms join the four previously selected startups - Soket AI Labs, gnani.ai, Gan.AI, and Sarvam - bringing the total number of companies under the Mission's foundation model initiative to twelve 1

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BharatGen, funded by the Department of Science and Technology, has proposed building AI models ranging from 2 billion to 2 trillion parameters. The consortium, led by Prof Ganesh Ramakrishnan at IIT Bombay, has already launched Param-1, a 2.9 billion parameter bilingual model with 25% Indic data 1

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Fractal Analytics, another selected firm, launched its open-source LLM, Fathom-R1-14B, in May. The company claims that this model delivers superior mathematical reasoning performance compared to some existing models 2

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Government Support and Infrastructure

The IndiaAI Mission, backed by the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY), has been ramping up both compute and model-building capacity. The government has expanded the total GPU capacity under the IndiaAI Compute Pillar to 34,000 GPUs, with plans to increase it to 40,000 GPUs soon 1

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Ambitious Goals and Future Prospects

Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has emphasized that the goal for each selected team is to become a global top-five player in their chosen sector, whether in multilingual foundation models, speech AI, or multimodal applications 1

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The minister also announced that administrative rules under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act will be released within the next 10 days, further strengthening India's digital infrastructure 3

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Financial Support and Future Events

The government has allocated Rs 1,500 crore in incentives for entities and individuals proposing to build AI models from the ground up 4

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. The selected firms are expected to unveil their models during the India AI Impact Summit next February, showcasing the progress made under the IndiaAI Mission 3

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