Why Indian billionaires are not betting big on AI and deep tech

India is packed with talent and has the world’s third-largest number of billionaires. Yet when you look at the world’s most valuable and innovative tech companies, India is barely visible. The missing piece? Long-term, high-risk investment into research, development, and truly new technology—especially in areas like AI and deep tech.

The billionaire paradox: rich individuals, low R&D

India has more billionaires than almost any other country, but its companies rarely show up in global rankings for innovation or market cap. A recent report found that not a single Indian company made it into the top 100 global firms by market capitalization.

At the same time, India’s private sector spends very little on research and development (R&D). While companies in the US, China, South Korea, and Japan fund the majority of their countries’ R&D, Indian businesses contribute only a small share.

In numbers, private companies and investors fund:

• 78% of all R&D in the United States
• 77% in China
• 79% in South Korea and Japan
• Only 36% in India

To make it worse, the combined annual R&D spending of India’s top 10 private companies is less than what a single US company like Nvidia spends on its own.

What long-term, “irrational” investing looks like

To understand what India is missing, it helps to look at how some of the world’s biggest tech breakthroughs were funded.

In 2002, Elon Musk sold his fintech company and walked away with around $176 million. Instead of playing it safe, he poured almost all of it into two extremely risky companies: Tesla and SpaceX. At the time, no private company had ever successfully launched a rocket into space, and most people believed an electric car company would fail.

Those were not rational, low-risk bets. They were long-term, high-conviction investments in a future that didn’t exist yet. Today, both Tesla and SpaceX are worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and Musk is one of the richest people on the planet because he was willing to fund the future, not just protect his wealth.

The same pattern shows up in AI. Back in 2015, long before ChatGPT, a group of American billionaires and tech leaders—including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, and Peter Thiel—committed around $1 billion to OpenAI when it was still a non-profit with no product and no revenue. For seven years, OpenAI didn’t make money. All it had was a vision to build world-class AI.

Those early, patient bets are a big reason why the US now leads the current AI wave. They show how “irrational” conviction can create entirely new industries.

How India’s biggest business houses invest today

India’s top business leaders have built massive companies—but mostly by scaling existing technologies, not by funding breakthrough innovation.

Mukesh Ambani (Reliance Industries) is worth around $100 billion, and Reliance is India’s most profitable company. One of his boldest moves was Jio, which spent billions to build telecom infrastructure and bring cheap internet to hundreds of millions of Indians. That move reshaped India’s digital economy and enabled a new generation of startups.

But Jio didn’t invent new core technology. It bought spectrum, built towers, acquired infrastructure, and scaled quickly. It was a brilliant business move, but not the same as betting on unproven technologies like new energy sources or foundational AI models. Reliance spends only about 0.4% of its revenue on R&D—very low compared to global tech giants.

Gautam Adani (Adani Group) has built huge businesses in ports, airports, coal, and green energy. Again, these are large-scale infrastructure plays built on existing technologies, not risky bets on deep tech or frontier science.

Even leaders who publicly call for more future-focused investment, like Uday Kotak, don’t yet have a visible track record of backing India’s deep tech or AI startups in a big way.

To be clear, these are highly successful entrepreneurs who have contributed enormously to India’s growth. But there’s a difference between building a great business and funding the future. Right now, most Indian billionaires are focused on expanding what already works, not on backing what doesn’t exist yet.

The result: foreign money funds India’s innovation

Despite this lack of domestic risk capital, India’s startup ecosystem has grown impressively. The country now has the world’s third-largest startup ecosystem, with over 100 unicorns and strong activity in sectors like fintech, space tech, and SaaS.

But the uncomfortable truth is that most of the money behind this growth comes from outside India. In the last five years, Indian startups raised about $112 billion in external funding—and roughly 80% of that came from foreign investors.

Most major venture capital firms active in India—like Peak XV, Accel, Prosus, Matrix Partners, Elevation Capital, Blume Ventures, and Y Combinator—are backed by limited partners sitting in the US and Europe. Indian billionaires, for the most part, are not the ones writing the early, risky checks for deep tech or AI.

This creates a strange situation: India has the talent and the startups, but the ownership and long-term upside of many breakthrough companies are flowing abroad.

Why Indian capital avoids deep tech and AI

So why isn’t Indian wealth flowing into AI labs, deep tech, and long-horizon R&D?

There are a few overlapping reasons:

• Risk appetite: Many Indian business families prefer predictable, asset-heavy sectors like infrastructure, energy, and real estate over uncertain, research-heavy bets.
• Culture of preservation: A lot of existing wealth is focused on expanding current empires and securing money for the next generation, not on backing founders who might fail multiple times before succeeding.
• Shorter time horizons: Deep tech and AI can take 7–10+ years to pay off. That doesn’t always fit with the expectations of traditional Indian business models or public markets.
• Comfort with services, not products: Indian IT giants like Infosys and TCS dominated services for decades but invested very little in building foundational AI products or platforms of their own. Today, many of their employees rely on AI tools built abroad.

In contrast, Silicon Valley has a strong culture of founders turning into angel investors and VCs, then backing the next generation. Jeff Bezos invested early in Google. Peter Thiel backed Facebook. Reid Hoffman helped fund OpenAI. Each wave of wealth helped create the next wave of innovation.

In India, that flywheel is still weak. When people win big, they rarely recycle that capital into early-stage, high-risk tech bets at scale.

What this means for AI and deep tech in India

The consequences of this underinvestment are already visible:

• Dependence on foreign AI: Indian companies and developers rely heavily on AI models and platforms built in the US and elsewhere. Instead of owning the core technology, India becomes a user and integrator.
• Missed opportunities in foundational research: With limited patient capital, it’s harder for Indian labs and startups to work on long-term AI research, robotics, or new energy technologies like fusion.
• Stock market divergence: While India’s markets have seen foreign investors pull out billions of dollars, US markets are booming on the back of the AI wave. Companies like Google, Meta, and Microsoft have seen massive stock jumps thanks to their AI bets.

Some Indian companies are trying to change this. For example, India-first AI players are emerging in areas like voice AI, local language models, and conversational agents. Platforms like Sarvam AI’s voice agents—similar in spirit to tools like ElevenLabs’ agents—are building specifically for Indian languages and price points. These kinds of local AI platforms could become critical infrastructure if they get enough support.

If you’re interested in building or using AI yourself, there are now many tools that make it easier to experiment. For example, if you want to explore voice technologies, you can follow guides like how to clone voices and create realistic AI voiceovers with Minimax Audio. And if you’re thinking about how AI will reshape careers and risk-taking, it’s worth reading analyses such as why AI is disrupting the traditional career ladder.

The cultural shift India needs

India doesn’t lack talent. Many of the world’s top tech companies are now led by Indian-origin CEOs. The missing ingredient is a culture of bold, patient, and sometimes “irrational” investing in the future.

Rational decisions are great for protecting the present. But the future is often built by people willing to make unreasonable bets—like funding a non-profit AI lab with no product for seven years, or putting nearly all their wealth into a rocket company when no private player has ever reached orbit.

For India to build world-leading AI and deep tech companies, its wealthiest individuals and largest corporations will need to:

• Allocate a meaningful share of capital to R&D and frontier tech
• Back early-stage founders working on hard, unproven problems
• Accept that some of these bets will fail completely—and that’s part of the game

Until that happens, India will continue to produce incredible talent and promising startups—but much of the deepest innovation, and the biggest long-term rewards, will keep flowing to countries that are willing to fund the future.