Hyderabad Emerges as GenAI Hub, Survey Highlights Startup Boom
"Hyderabad's GenAI ecosystem is a beacon amid global layoffs like Amazon's —start-ups here aren't replacing jobs, they're creating high-skill ones in frontier tech," said IT expert Dr Ravi Kumar, CEO of Hyderabad-based AI firm NexaGen Labs.
HYDERABAD: As Amazon slashes 30,000 jobs worldwide to pivot aggressively toward Generative AI replacements, Hyderabad is charging ahead, hosting seven per cent of India's GenAI start-ups as per the Economic Survey 2025-26. With over 60 such ventures working in the area of applications, infrastructure and services, Hyderabad is riding a wave of deep tech funding that jumped 78% in calendar year 2024, as per Nasscom data cited in the report.
India's tech start-up ecosystem — the world's third largest — has up to 35,000 firms, adding over 2,000 last year along, among them 900 which are funded. GenAI start-ups tripled from 240 in first half of 2024 to 890 by the first half of last year, with cumulative funding hitting $990 million. Karnataka led with 39 per cent, followed by Maharashtra (14) and Delhi (nine), but Telangana's seven per cent share marked Hyderabad's rise alongside Haryana (six) and Tamil Nadu (five).
"Hyderabad's GenAI ecosystem is a beacon amid global layoffs like Amazon's —start-ups here aren't replacing jobs, they're creating high-skill ones in frontier tech," said IT expert Dr Ravi Kumar, CEO of Hyderabad-based AI firm NexaGen Labs.
The Economic Survey highlighted a structural shift in IT-ITeS toward productivity-boosting GenAI, cloud, cyber security, a $6 billion market growing that is growing at 30 per cent annually, and data engineering. India clinched Tier-1 on ITU's Global Cyber security Index 2024, a UN backed assessment with a 98.49 score, placing it among the world’s most cyber-resilient countries.
Though UN Trade and Developmen (Unctad) ranked India 36th in frontier technology readiness index in 2025 as against 48th in 2022 among 170 economies, the challenges persisted; the report stated the India lags in information and communication technology (ICT) skills diffusion. It pointed to constraints in the wider diffusion of frontier technologies across firms and regions.
