BENGALURU: The Indian start-up ecosystem is maturing with a huge amount of investments getting into deeptech and the Gen AI space, and we have a lot of tailwinds in a country like India, said Kumara Raghavan, Head, Startups, AWS (Amazon Web Services) India and South Asia.
India has about 5 million software developers, the second-largest developer nation in the world, according to Evans Data Corporation.
In an interaction with The New Indian Express, Raghavan said, "A key component of that is also to get the right amount of skills. With something like generative AI, you need skills, not just for the developers, but also for the business user, and that's an area that we are investing into."
In 2025, AWS announced plans to invest $8.3 billion into cloud infrastructure in the AWS Asia-Pacific (Mumbai) Region in Maharashtra, to further expand cloud computing capacity in India. AWS has trained over 5.9 million individuals in India on cloud skills since 2017.
If you look at the way the investments happen in the country, historically, the largest amount of funding goes into fintech, followed by ISVs(independent software vendors), which are building in India for the world, he said.
"Third would be the e-commerce and then a variety of categories like health and property tech. But I think one of the interesting observations that we saw last year was there's a lot of money that went into ecommerce and the quick commerce space," he said, adding there is a huge amount of investment that's also getting into the deeptech and Gen AI space.
Talking about the maturing start-up ecosystem, he said, now, we have second-, third-, and fourth-time founders who have been there and done that, and that is essentially helping the whole broader ecosystem in terms of being successful faster or failing faster, and then having a more mature product in terms of output.
"I think one of the proofs of that is also a number of IPOs that we are seeing. So, the start-up ecosystem is definitely maturing, and we will see a big wave of innovation coming from that area as well. Also, the continued interest in investment, that's another signal that says there is a lot more happening here," he added.
Funding into Indian start-ups is also increasing as start-ups raised $2.5 billion, a 13% growth in Q1 2025, he added.