Decoding AI
Season
1
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Episode
8
Building AI4Bharat: Why India Needs Its Own AI Stack, With IIT Prof. Mitesh Khapra
It’s almost a consensus view that India can’t build its AI future on borrowed code. It needs infrastructure rooted in Indian languages, accents, and real-world use cases. At the heart of this mission is AI4Bharat, an open-source initiative building cutting-edge AI models for all 22 official Indian languages.
In this episode of Decoding AI, Prayank Swaroop, Partner at Accel, sits down with Professor Mitesh Khapra, one of the key architects of India’s Indic and open-source AI movement and co-lead of the AI4Bharat initiative at IIT Madras. A former researcher at IBM and now a faculty member at the Wadhwani School of Data Science and AI, IIT Madras, Mitesh has been instrumental in laying the groundwork for India’s AI stack.
The conversation traces the journey of AI4Bharat, from early experiments mapping real-world problems to a focused effort on building foundational language technologies that power applications across sectors. Mitesh shares how the team is bridging data gaps, enabling synthetic data generation, and competing with global benchmarks, all while staying open-source.
This episode unpacks why India needs its own AI infrastructure, what makes AI for Bharat technically and culturally distinct, and how startups and developers can plug into this growing ecosystem to build truly inclusive AI solutions.
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We’d love to hear about your experiences with marketplaces. Let us share our learnings and build a better and stronger ecosystem. Write to us at [email protected] to be a part of the Accel family.
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We’re building Passionfroot 1, an operating system for creators to manage their business.
We’re based in Europe and raised our $ 3.4m pre-seed round from Creandum and US angels such as Vlad (Webflow) and creators like Ali Abdaal.As we’re creating a new category and as the creator economy is global and mostly online, we’re building from Day 1 a global company and product that helps creators monetize around the world.
This brings a lot of complexities especially in terms of payments and taxes as our early users are based both in Europe and the US and deal with cross-border transactions.What are Do’s and Dont’s for European startups who have a global ambition and build products for a global customer base from Day 1. Anything you would do differently?
Thanks @pjbouten! Love how you’ve thought about incrementally shaping a category with a focus on product and service, and only then thinking about getting the message out there vs the other way around.
And totally agree on the distinctions and overlaps both self-serve and enterprise motions share.
Thanks, PJ, for taking the time to address questions from the great vantage of shaping Showpad into a global, enterprise SaaS brand!