The private investment firm has invested in these AI companies from January 1, 2021, to date, participating in 19 funding rounds ranging from seed-stage investments to mature Series F rounds.
Seed funding is the earliest institutional capital raised by a startup to develop its product and business model, while Series F is a late-stage funding round typically raised by companies that have already scaled and are preparing for further expansion, acquisitions, or a potential public listing. Premji Invest’s investments have been spread across the years, with the bulk coming in 2024 and 2025, when it participated in five funding rounds each year, followed by four rounds in 2022.
What is interesting is that while India has been debating the need for greater funding support for domestic AI startups, Premji Invest has largely placed its bets on US-based AI companies — except for early investments in two Bengaluru-based startups.
However, there is a strong Indian connection among several of the US-based startups it has backed. Five of them — Hippocratic AI, Baseten, SpotDraft, Galileo Technologies, and Pixis AI — were founded by Indian entrepreneurs, although their headquarters are located in the US. A spokesperson for Premji Invest declined to comment on queries sent to the firm.
Some of Premji Invest’s bets have turned out to be major winners. In September 2025, the firm participated in a $150 million Series D funding round in Baseten, founded in 2019, which provides low-code machine learning infrastructure for developing AI applications. A Series D round is a later-stage funding round raised by companies looking to scale further. The round was led by Bond Capital and valued the company at $2.15 billion.
Baseten, founded by Indian entrepreneurs Tuhin Srivastava and Pankaj Gupta, saw its valuation climb to $13 billion after its latest $1.5 billion Series F funding round in June 2026 — over six times the valuation when Premji Invest first put in its cheque.
In November 2025, Premji Invest participated in a $126 million Series C funding round by Hippocratic AI, founded by Indian entrepreneurs Munjal Shah, Vishal Parikh, and others. A Series C round is typically raised by companies that have proven their business model. The company has developed generative AI (GenAI) voice agents designed to handle low-risk patient-facing administrative and clinical workflows. This was the third funding round in which Premji Invest participated since March 2024. Hippocratic AI’s valuation has risen sevenfold, from $500 million in 2024 to $3.5 billion currently.
The investment firm has also made large bets on other US-based AI companies. In its latest deal in February this year, it invested in Runway, a GenAI video startup, which raised $315 million in a Series E round. A Series E round is a late-stage growth funding round raised by mature companies. The round, which included investors such as Nvidia and General Atlantic, increased Runway’s valuation to $5.3 billion from $3 billion in its previous fundraise in 2025.
In June 2025, Premji Invest participated in a $600 million Series F funding round in Sunnyvale, California-based Applied Intuition, a developer of vehicle software, simulation, validation, and autonomous driving AI systems. The round, which included investors such as Kleiner Perkins, BlackRock, and Fidelity Investments, pushed the company’s post-money valuation to $15 billion, compared with $6 billion when it last raised money in 2024.
The fund house, however, has been more cautious about backing Indian AI startups. In 2021, it invested in AI-enabled education technology company Questt as part of an early-stage $6.8 million funding round led by Celesta Capital. In 2022, it was among the investors that provided seed funding of $4 million to Bengaluru-based Binocs.
 "Azim Premji, founder chairman, Wipro")