India faces capital, talent gap in foundational AI race: Menlo Ventures’ Deedy Das

India faces a significant challenge in building globally competitive foundational AI companies as top research talent remains concentrated in San Francisco and local investors are yet to demonstrate the appetite for large, high-risk bets required at the model layer, Menlo Ventures partner Deedy Das said.

“Any competent foundational model builder out of India, you have to ask the question: why would you work at Sarvam and not at OpenAI or Anthropic?” Das said at The Economic Times World Leaders Forum 2026, held in New Delhi on August 21-22. “If you joined a company like Anthropic or OpenAI three years ago, you would be worth $100 million today. It’s very difficult for somebody to reject that.”

Das is a partner at Silicon Valley-based Menlo Ventures, an early backer of Anthropic that’s focussed on investments in artificial intelligence (AI), infrastructure, and enterprise software. Before joining Menlo, he was a founding engineer at enterprise AI startup Glean, where he led the development of Glean Assistant. Prior to that, he spent five years in technical roles at Facebook and Google (including search and AI).


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Menlo Ventures first backed Anthropic in its series C round in May 2023, when the Claude-maker — valued at around $4.1 billion — was yet to launch a product or generate revenues. It subsequently led a large follow-on investment in 2024 and continued participating in later rounds. The firm’s stake in Anthropic was worth nearly $14 billion as of June, Bloomberg reported, as the AI firm’s valuation crossed $900 billion. Menlo Ventures has secured $3 billion across new vehicles this year, the largest fundraise in its 50-year history, as it doubles down on AI investments.

It also operates the $100-million Anthology Fund in partnership with Anthropic to back early-stage AI startups.

Das said such investments underline the amount of risk capital needed to compete in foundational models, where companies must spend heavily on computing infrastructure and research before generating meaningful revenue.

He was also bullish on Anthropic’s prospects as it prepares for a public listing. Asked whether a valuation of around $2 trillion that’s being discussed for Anthropic was justified, Das said it would still undervalue the company. Bloomberg reported this week that Anthropic expects its initial public offering to match or exceed SpaceX’s record-setting IPO.

“It’s way under(valued)... I think it should be more,” he said, pointing to the company’s rapid revenue growth. “Look at SpaceX. It makes nowhere near that kind of money. And look at how the markets price SpaceX.”

Elon Musk-led SpaceX raised $75 billion in its June IPO at a valuation of about $1.77 trillion, making it the world’s largest-ever public issue. Its market capitalisation climbed above $2.3 trillion in its second trading session.

Anthropic confidentially filed for a US IPO in June and was last valued at $965 billion after raising $65 billion in May. Its annual revenue run rate crossed $65 billion by July, up from around $9 billion at the end of 2025.

Das said India could have stronger opportunities at the application layer, while investments in computing infrastructure were also creating opportunities lower down the AI stack. He spoke of OpenRouter, a portfolio company, as an example of an AI business that could be built out of India but benefits from being close to model developers and cloud providers in the US.

“There’s no reason why somebody in India couldn’t build an OpenRouter,” Das said. But such businesses need to negotiate capacity and contracts with companies like Google Cloud, Anthropic, and OpenAI as they scale, making proximity to San Francisco important, he added.

OpenRouter, which provides developers a single interface to access and switch between hundreds of AI models, was founded in 2023. Menlo Ventures invested in the company, with Das serving as a board observer. Earlier this week, payments major Stripe agreed to acquire OpenRouter for just over $8 billion, according to Reuters. More than 10 million developers and businesses use the platform, and it processes over 10 trillion tokens a day.

His comments come as the government steps up its sovereign AI push under the IndiaAI Mission, which has selected 20 indigenous foundation-model proposals and sanctioned subsidised compute for 237 projects.

Other founders on the panel pointed to India’s growing importance as an AI market. Wispr cofounder and chief executive Tanay Kothari said that over the past nine months, India had gone from being a market that companies did not prioritise to “one of the primary markets people wanted to come to.”

Menlo Ventures led a $280 million round in Wispr earlier this month, valuing the voice AI startup at $2 billion.

Zingroll founder Harshit Yadav said Indian entrepreneurs could find a larger opportunity in AI applications. “It’s generally been true in history that most technology shifts... when they plateau, it’s usually the application that holds most of (the) value,” he said.