Indian IT's AI Startups Deals Have Changed Since 2024—For the Better

In 2024, Indian IT firms had bet on startup partnerships to accelerate AI adoption, with Infosys, Wipro, and HCLTech tapping firms like yellow.ai and Sarvam AI to provide small language models and build multi-agent systems for clients. The story has been much different since. 

IT firms are now focusing on structural overhaul, with the partnership vocabulary shifting from generative AI to agentic AI. TCS, Infosys, HCLTech, Wipro, LTIMindtree, and Tech Mahindra reported that the majority of their recent contract wins were focused on generative AI, agentic AI, machine learning, and AI-led automation.

"At the broadest level, there are two partnerships. One is with all the bigger AI players, including the infra players and the compute players. Everyone is racing towards forging some sort of alliance with these companies. On the startup side, these are partnerships with vertical solution companies that have deep domain expertise in a particular industry segment," Praveen Bhadada, CEO and MD of consulting firm Neovay Global, tells AIM.

The nature of the deals has changed. In some cases, the most high-profile startup bets are going to companies headquartered in San Francisco rather than India—a shift that is as telling as the deals themselves.

Infosys Bets

Infosys has had one of the busiest fifteen months of any Indian IT major, racking up partnerships with both global AI labs and startups in quick succession.

In January 2026, it made a defining deal with Cognition, the makers of Devin, the “first AI software engineer”, to deploy Devin across Infosys' internal engineering ecosystem and client engagements worldwide. It combined Infosys Topaz Fabric’s modular architecture with Cognition's agentic and autonomous engineering capabilities. 

Cognition founder Scott Wu described Infosys as "the first large digital services and consulting firm to deploy agentic tools at this scale."

Meanwhile, Infosys also deepened its relationships with frontier AI labs. It partnered with Anthropic, integrating its Claude models into the enterprise ecosystem. Earlier this month, Infosys teamed up with OpenAI to integrate its AI-powered tools into the Topaz AI platform, combining OpenAI's Codex, workflow automation tools, prebuilt AI agents, and Infosys' own poly-AI systems.

“The way these are working is that they have some good technology on the foundation models. With that in any of those six areas of our AI services, we can take that as a partner and work with our clients," Infosys CEO Salil Parekh said during a press conference post Q4 earnings.

Infosys has also maintained its partnership with Bengaluru-based Sarvam AI, continuing to deploy Sarvam's Indic-language models for banking and IT operations through its Topaz BankingSLM and ITOpsSLM offerings.

Wipro and HCLTech's Investment Strategies

Wipro has taken a different approach, using its venture arm to drive deeper startup integration. Early last year, Wipro committed $200 million to Wipro Ventures to invest in startups across AI, data and analytics, cybersecurity, and cloud infrastructure—a signal that commercial agreements alone were no longer sufficient.

In January 2026, Wipro and Factory, an agent-native software development platform and a portfolio company of Wipro Ventures, partnered to help enterprises operationalise agent-native development. Wipro Ventures also participated in Factory's recent funding round, going beyond a simple services agreement to take a financial stake in the outcome.

"Our partnership with Factory reflects a broader shift among global enterprises, from AI experimentation towards production-scale adoption," Sandhya Arun, Chief Technology Officer, Wipro, had commented.

On the cybersecurity front, Wipro partnered with CrowdStrike to launch AI-based CyberShield MDR, an integrated security service that strengthens threat detection. In April, Wipro also launched a dedicated AI-Native Business and Platforms Unit to incubate new AI-led business streams through an invest-build-partner approach.

HCLTech has signalled the most structural shift of any IT major—moving from partnerships to direct equity investments. According to a Moneycontrol report, HCLTech is among the potential investors in Sarvam AI's $250 million funding round, alongside NVIDIA and Accel. 

HCLTech has also continued its collaboration with Inspeq AI, a Bengaluru-based responsible AI startup. It has also signed a multi-year strategic deal with OpenAI, and prior to that, partnered with agentic AI platform yellow.ai as part of its broader AI push.

TCS’s Infrastructure Play

Of all the Indian IT majors, TCS has made the most capital-intensive bet. 

Last year, it announced a $7 billion investment to create a 1 GW AI data centre network. In late 2025, TCS launched HyperVault, a $2 billion data center project in partnership with private equity firm TPG, to build gigawatt-scale AI-ready infrastructure in India.

On the startup side, TCS has deepened its existing partnerships. It tapped Kore.ai, the Hyderabad-founded conversational AI platform, to develop virtual assistant solutions across industries on its agentic GenAI platform, a relationship that dates back to 2020. TCS and yellow.ai are also collaborating to enhance enterprise experience through omnichannel, multilingual AI agents, making yellow.ai, alongside Kore.ai, one of the most deeply embedded Indian AI startups across the IT sector's client base.

Most recently, South Korean tech major Naver teamed up with TCS to jointly develop AI and cloud services in India.

Tech Mahindra’s Approach

Under CEO Mohit Joshi's "AI Delivered Right" strategy, Tech Mahindra is focused on building internal AI capabilities rather than acquiring them through external deals.

The clearest expression of this is TechM Orion, an agentic AI platform built on NVIDIA accelerated computing, helping enterprises with AI adoption. In December 2025, Tech Mahindra announced it would accelerate enterprise adoption of Gemini Enterprise using Google's Gemini 2.5 multimodal models, combining its Orion framework with Google Cloud's AI capabilities to design, deploy, and scale next-generation agentic AI solutions.

Big Bets or Big Mergers?

At the India AI Impact Summit earlier this year, Anthropic collaborated with Infosys to deploy AI agents across telecom, financial services, manufacturing, and software development. 

In December 2025, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced partnerships with Cognizant, Infosys, TCS, and Wipro to accelerate agentic AI adoption—with each firm deploying over 50,000 Microsoft Copilot licenses, collectively crossing 200,000 licenses, described as one of the largest enterprise-wide AI implementations to date.

"There's a huge software development life cycle acceleration programme going on, and enterprises are co-creating platforms. With these co-created platforms, they'll also use what's available off the shelf. They're building alongside providers as well. All these things are a work in progress," said Viswanathan KS, who formerly served as a vice president at Nasscom.

According to a 2025 EY-CII report, nearly half of Indian enterprises now report having multiple generative AI use cases in production, a sign that the market IT firms are serving has itself moved from exploration to execution. Enterprise AI spending is projected to grow significantly over the next five years as deployments scale.

The question of whether this leads to new innovation, or to a wave of acquisitions where IT giants absorb the startups they once partnered with, may be settled sooner than expected. 

"The large companies don't have the time to organically keep building the AI capability," notes Bhadada. He adds that the industry will see more focus on mergers and acquisitions in the next six to twelve months as they rewire their core business models.

That re-wiring is already underway. How far it goes will define the next chapter of Indian IT's AI story.