Region Focus | India & South Asia
Tracxn data shows India's Indic AI ecosystem has raised $399 million across nine rounds through October 15, 2026 — 17x the $23 million raised in all of 2025 — with 87% of that coming from just two funding rounds at a single company, Sarvam AI. Cumulatively, Sarvam and Krutrim together account for 68% of all funding ever tracked across the sector's 34 companies. SEBI's chairman publicly floated building a domestically governed AI model for securities markets, citing confidentiality and availability concerns about frontier models. Pakistan's deputy prime minister confirmed in parliament that the country has signed on to the China-led World AI Cooperation Organization (WAICO). The same week, Microsoft's diffusion data showed India's working-age AI usage rate at 18.5% — the highest in South Asia, but Pakistan (11.9%), Bangladesh (8.0%) and Sri Lanka (7.6%) are bunched within 5 points of each other, and the whole region still trails Singapore's 64.3% by a wide margin.