Building for India 2030: How AI is transforming critical industries

Beyond the glamour of chatbots and recommendation engines, artificial intelligence is rewriting India’s economic foundation with groundbreaking innovations across sectors. 

If research labs are using AI systems to accelerate scientific discoveries, healthcare experts are using machine learning to speed up diagnostic processes, while fintech firms are democratising access to capital using algorithms. 

Not just that, traditional sectors such as agriculture are also increasingly using computer intelligence to optimise crop yields, production, and consumption. 

For years, YourStory has been on top of all these innovations, and we are keen to steer the conversation deeper and further. 

As India lays the foundation for a $10-trillion economy by 2030 with a digital-first, innovation-driven approach, the upcoming edition of TechSparks—YourStory’s flagship tech-startup conference—will focus on artificial intelligence and examine its far-reaching potential. According to a report by EY, India’s AI revolution is poised to add $1.5 trillion to the country’s GDP by 2030, creating millions of new-age jobs across agritech, spacetech, healthtech, and manufacturing.  

TechSparks 2025, titled India 2030: Powered by AI, from November 6 to 8, will bring together ecosystem leaders to explore all this and more. 

In the run-up to the event's 16th edition, we spotlight some key AI-driven innovations across the five critical sectors of deeptech, healthtech, agritech, fintech, and climatetech and how AI will impact the country’s next decade. 

India’s deeptech moment 

India’s deeptech sector added over 480 startups in 2023, twice the previous year’s count, according to a report by Nasscom and Zinnov. The report also says that the sector experienced a 78% surge in funding in 2024. 

India’s most transformative companies are emerging and will continue to emerge from the deeptech space, says Manish Gupta, General Partner, growX ventures.

“This is not a trend we are responding to, it is a thesis we have backed since the beginning. Today, we are seeing an increasing number of repeat founders and deeply technical talent solving hard problems across core science and engineering-first domains,” he says. 

Deeptech companies are not just fuelling AI innovations themselves but are also supporting companies from other sectors embracing AI. 

As AI adoption grows, so does the need for computing power. As a result, data centres are eating up massive amounts of energy. In response to this, Bengaluru-based CIMware has figured out how to make servers share their resources better. 

“As compute demand grows in data centres, due to AI and ML workloads, the scale-out architecture increases energy consumption and cooling effort. CIMware helps data centres to hyper scale up with super high performance at very low TCO (total cost of ownership),” says Rajiv Ganth, Founder & CEO, CIMware. 

Meanwhile, QNU Labs has built a full-stack, quantum-safe security platform to protect sensitive data from security threats.

"Most legacy encryption solutions, still in use today, will collapse the moment quantum computers become mainstream—potentially now for the next few years. That’s where QNu Labs leads from the front. We have built full-stack, integrated quantum-safe security platform, designed to protect sensitive data today against the threats of tomorrow," says Sunil Gupta, CEO & Co-founder of QNu Labs.

Scaling healthcare with AI

Meanwhile, in the world of healthcare, AI is streamlining administrative processes and improving clinical decision-making. Around 76% of Indian healthcare professionals believe that AI can help improve outcomes for patients, reveals Philips Future Health Index 2025. 

This is already happening. 

For instance, Niramai Health Analytix’s Thermalytix is an AI-powered medical device for early-stage breast cancer detection. 

“Thermalytix analyses detailed temperature maps with 50x higher thermal sensitivity, allowing for earlier and more accurate detection across all age groups and breast densities,” says Geetha Manjunath, Founder, CEO of Nirmai Health Analytix. 

Similarly, Wysa’s platform for mental health support uses AI to provide a safe space for users to converse about sensitive topics related to mental health and receive empathetic responses. 

“Wysa AI acts as a sophisticated coach, leveraging eight years of accumulated evidence, research, and partnerships to build therapeutic relationships and encourage positive change. The platform shows how GenAI can effectively reduce mental health risk, thereby preventing potential backlash against AI in this critical field,” says Ramakant Vempati, Founder and President, Wysa. 

Supercharging finance 

AI is also increasingly driving use cases across banking, insurance, and fintech, without compromising on compliance. 

Bengaluru-based HyperVerge is supporting this transformation with a full-stack, AI-powered identity verification and onboarding platform. The platform uses neural networks–based computer vision to perform tasks such as optical character recognition on identity documents and facial biometric matching for user verification.

Kishore Natarajan, Co-founder of HyperVerge says, “"If your business is to sell insurance, get better at building great insurance products, at pricing them, or marketing your product. What we do is help you with making sure compliance is handled end-to-end.”  

Towards sustainability 

According to PwC’s 2024 State of Climate Tech report, startups focused on AI-based climate solutions raised $6 billion in venture capital funding in the first three quarters of last year alone, surpassing the total for all of 2023 by $1 billion.

Climate solutions are being increasingly recognised as a catalyst for global growth and economic development. 

Climate change has a direct bearing on agricultural productivity. Ironically, agriculture is also a major driver of climate change. This complex relationship between climate change and agriculture calls for creative solutions. 

This is what Bengaluru-based Cropin aims to accomplish. The climate-tech startup has spent over a decade turning raw farm data into ‘agricultural intelligence’. Its cloud platform uses satellite, weather, and agronomic data to generate insights on crop health and risk factors.

“We zoom into farms and try to decode their past, present, and future. We focus on areas such as how the crop has behaved in the past, and what is the potential today? What are the risks that can hit that farm from disease or climate?” says Krishna Kumar, Founder, Cropin. 

TechSparks 2025 will bring to light more such innovations as it gathers builders, researchers, regulators, and investors shaping India’s AI roadmap that’s responsible, inclusive, and at scale. 

Don’t miss out! 

(The copy was updated with additional information.)