India to offer more opportunities for next 500 mn users: Prosus' Sharma

The India head of the Dutch tech investment firm explains why Prosus is betting on India's heterogeneous market and AI-first strategy

Prosus, the Amsterdam-based technology investor with net assets valued at over $200 billion spanning payments to e-commerce, has identified India as one of its most critical growth markets, and is increasing its strategic investments here. The company, which backs Swiggy, Meesho, and PayU, is deploying more than 20,000 artificial intelligence (AI) agents globally to scale operations and enhance portfolio company performance. In a video interview with Peerzada Abrar, Ashutosh Sharma, who heads Prosus's India ecosystem, discusses the firm's recent investments in mobility and travel, its proprietary AI capabilities, and why he believes India's market heterogeneity will spawn multiple winners across consumption segments. Edited excerpts:

 

What's the strategic rationale behind investing in mobility (Rapido) and travel (ixigo) now?

 

Even if you look at them on a standalone basis, these are amazing companies. Prosus chief executive officer (CEO) Fabricio Bloisi recently highlighted the growth that Rapido is seeing in the mobility space. Based on the number of rides per day, Rapido probably is the largest mobility provider despite starting last.

 

Similarly, ixigo has accreted market share over the last three-four years. Today, it's probably the second-largest OTA (online travel aggregator) in India. Extremely product-led company, extremely high NPS (net promoter score) that you see among customers.

 

If you look at the large discretionary spend that a consumer does in India, we almost have access to most of that. Food — we invested in Swiggy. Groceries — we are in quick commerce (qcom). Home services — Urban Company; e-commerce (ecom) — we are in Meesho. But mobility and travel were missing pieces in our portfolio.

 

We could not only participate in this value unlock but also align very closely beyond capital, for example, to introduce our AI capabilities to these companies. We have solid AI capabilities internally, with a team in Amsterdam building products that could be used by portfolio companies.

 

Prosus mentions deploying 20,000 AI agents globally. Can you share concrete examples of how AI is being used?

 

The 20,000 agents are spread not just in India, but all over the world and also within Prosus functional areas.

 

My team uses an agent to figure out the lay of the land for an industry. We give our agent the task to tell us about the industry, the key players, the regulatory aspects, key investors, what have been success stories. It comes back with a solid 10, 15, 20 pagers.

 

Why not just use ChatGPT or DeepSeek? Well, they cannot tap into private databases that we have access to. Our agent can.

 

At Swiggy, you can feed a picture of a dish into an agent and the agent will write the description. At Meesho, AI has the capability to change content on the fly into your specific language. AI can show you SKUs (stock keeping units) which the algorithm thinks is much more interesting to your demand profile.

 

The lowest-hanging use case is across contact centres. Almost all of these companies have offloaded their contact centres to agents now.

 

You're calling Prosus an ‘AI-first organisation’. What does this mean practically? Are you building proprietary AI models?

 

Our model, which we call LCM (large commerce model), is extremely narrow. The application is in the commerce use case, and it has been trained on a proprietary database of billions of transactions across companies that we own.

 

You take an open source AI engine, and then you train it on your database. What comes out is extremely proprietary because it's been trained on data that only you have. That becomes a competitive advantage for our portfolio companies.

 

Our intent is to keep our AI efforts completely focused on commerce and use cases that help our ecosystem.

 

With Meesho representing value commerce, how do you see this opportunity evolving? Are you looking to make further bets as consumption patterns shift in Tier-2 and -3 cities?

 

While India is large, it is extremely heterogeneous. Unlike the US, which is largely homogeneous, India has many languages, many demographics, very different discretionary spending, and very different digital maturity.

 

For someone, it's fun to go on Amazon and type in the search bar. For some people, it's browsing — they just scroll and see if something comes up that they like.

 

It's hard to see how one product wins all of India. There will be many different products even in the same category that will find product market fit with different sets of people. Is it value commerce? Browsing-based commerce? Audio commerce? Social or live commerce?

 

We at Prosus are completely involved in looking at these different options. India will throw up many more opportunities for the next 500 million user base.

 

With qcom exploding and fintech consolidating, how is Prosus positioning its portfolio? Are there white spaces you're looking to fill through acquisitions?

 

The decision to embark on M&A (mergers and acquisitions) will be made by the management and their respective boards. We have one voice, but we are not the only voice.

 

India, when it comes to M&A as a tool to grow and expand, has generally been slow compared to the US and China. As a general matter, I think it's important that companies in India do look at this as a tool.

 

With many of these companies getting listed, they have the liquid currency to actually act now. My assumption is that we will see more action. WhatsApp is an amazing example of what it did. YouTube is another amazing example. Many such opportunities exist in India.

 

One of your portfolio companies PayU achieved profitability in the second quarter of 2025-26 (Q2FY26) after receiving payment aggregator licence. How critical was this regulatory approval?

 

I would not qualify it as a turnaround. PayU was under embargo for an extended period, just like other fintechs. They could not onboard merchants for a period of time.

 

The embargo got lifted, and since then, we are back on the growth trajectory. Beyond being a payments aggregator, we continue to add capabilities which our enterprise and SMB (small and medium-sized business) customers really appreciate. We made acquisitions with Wibmo and Mindgate, and launched organically developed capabilities at GFF (Global Fintech Fest).

 

The second leg is credit. We moved away from our old business to partnerships where we partnered with companies like Swiggy and Meesho, bringing certain capabilities while they brought access to their merchant base.