AI startups look to forge partnerships, collaborations to boost growth

At the India AI Impact Summit, startups sought strategic partnerships and MoUs to scale, secure compute access, expand globally and co-create solutions across sectors

The expo arena at the ongoing India AI Impact Summit at New Delhi’s Bharat Mandapam was brimming with energy on Day 3, with artificial intelligence (AI) startups actively engaging with policymakers, investors and visitors and showcasing their cutting-edge products and solutions.  

They are on the lookout for strategic partnerships, collaborations and memoranda of understanding (MoUs) that can help them scale faster, access resources and expand into global markets. 

Legal-tech startup LexLegis.ai is eyeing global expansion through strategic alliances. Saakar S Yadav, managing director (MD) of the firm, said: “We want to introduce our technologies and solutions to the world and meet like-minded companies to help us expand globally. We are looking to sign an MoU with KPMG and Commercial Law House. These collaborations will assist us in taking our solutions to the market.” 

On the collaboration, a representative from KPMG who did not wish to be named, said: “The firm is excited to take these new-generation, AI-enabled solutions offered by LexLegis.ai to its clients.” 

 

Personalised video platform True Fan AI, meanwhile, is pursuing partnerships across both infrastructure and distribution. “From our side, there will be two kinds of partnerships — one will be on the technology and infrastructure side with big companies like Amazon and Nvidia. We are a company that is a fruit of technology and we require heavy graphics processing units (GPUs) to be available to us to do more training. For distribution, we work with 80 large brands like HDFC Bank, Bajaj Finance, and Zomato, and want to reach at least 500 brands,” Nimish Goel, cofounder and chief executive officer (CEO) of the firm said. 

 

While several startups are scouting partnerships in the corporate world, SquadStack.ai is seeking a collaboration with IndiaAI Mission. Apurv Agarwal, its cofounder and CEO, said: “India stands at a defining moment in AI leadership, and meaningful innovation will be built through strong ecosystem partnerships. We are actively exploring a deeper collaboration and potential MoU with IndiaAI Mission to accelerate the development and adoption of advanced conversational AI systems built in India, for India.”

 

With two full days still remaining, discussions are rapidly translating into formal agreements for some participants. For instance, Pankaj Thapa, cofounder and CEO of cybersecurity company Mirror Security said the firm has collaborated with Nvidia to make secure encrypted inferencing faster and more practical.

 

“By using Nvidia’s powerful GPU technologies — like CUDA, cuBLAS, NeMo, and TensorRT-LLM — the platform can run fully encrypted AI computations at speed. This means sensitive data stays encrypted the entire time, even while the AI is analysing it. For industries like healthcare, finance, and government, this partnership allows them to use AI safely without ever exposing confidential information,” Thapa added. 

 

Likewise, in the healthcare space, Eka Care has also partnered with Nvidia to tap its AI software and compute infrastructure. “By combining Eka Care’s deep clinical data expertise with Nvidia’s AI infrastructure and domain expertise, the initiative will address critical challenges in healthcare such as data privacy, internet dependency, and the need for real-time, low-latency transcription,” Eka Care said in a statement. 

 

Brandworks Technologies, an electronics manufacturing firm, signed an MoU with MeitY Startup Hub (MSH) to “deepen innovation, co-create AI-led hardware solutions with early and growth-stage startups, and build scalable commercialisation pathways in the electronics and IT domain.”

 

Ahead of the summit, drone-based logistics firm SkyeAir announced a cross-border collaboration with two US-based companies Arrive AI and Ottonomy to automate doorstep delivery of parcels without any human intervention. 

 

Ankit Kumar, CEO of the firm said, “We just launched asynchronous end-to-end autonomous deliveries with drone, pod and rover working together establishing real world implementation for physical AI. Further, we have a great ambition that we want to automate a lot of workflows and AI has got a lot of things to play around with. We are working on a lot of agentic workflows which will automate customer service, drone station and package tracking.”