AI Startups To Watch: 5 Startups That Caught Our Eye In August

India's AI landscape is expanding beyond creating an Indian version of ChatGPT. The government's IndiaAI Mission, with a budget of around ₹10,300 Cr, is supporting 20 indigenous sovereign AI model proposals and building a public dataset platform. Outside the government program, innovative AI startups are emerging, focusing on domain expertise and overcoming data and compute constraints.

These startups aim to build systems that are challenging to replicate, such as proprietary datasets, local-language capabilities, and domain-specific intelligence. The funding for AI startups in India has surged, with Indian AI startups raising $676 Mn in the first six months of 2026, almost quadrupling the amount raised in the same period last year.

The Inc42's AI Startups To Watch feature highlights five promising ventures: Clairva, Coreworks, eNLife Research, and two unnamed startups. Clairva converts real-world video into structured behavioral signals for AI training, fine-tuning, and evaluation. Coreworks offers AI-powered business intelligence, generating finished reports or presentations with traceable metrics. eNLife Research develops an AI-powered pipeline to detect and provide personalized interventions for neurodegenerative diseases.

These startups are working on solving real-world problems that AI faces when moving from the laboratory to the practical world.