From Brain Drain To Base Camp: How Bharat1 Is Trying To Anchor AI In India

From Perplexity cofounder Aravind Srinivas and Anthropic CTO Rahul Patil to big tech giants such as Google’s Sundar Pichai and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Indian brains are driving deeptech and AI businesses in the West.  

But, India ironically lags behind countries like the US and China in terms of the number of homegrown deeptech companies. Enter Bharat1.ai, a startup trying to bridge this gap.

Founded earlier this year by Subhashish Banerjee, Umakant Soni, and Sireesh Kupendra, the company has set up an AI city in Bengaluru. In its first phase, the company has developed an AI Superpark for startups, academic institutions like IITs and BITS, and large enterprises such as banks.

The founders describe Bharat1 as a company building a ‘humanity-centric’ AI ecosystem. It has tied up with NVIDIA and a host of local and multinational foundational partners like AI research labs and academic institutions for this purpose. 

The Making Of B1 AI Superpark

In the first phase, the company has created 500,000 sq ft of AI innovation space for startups, corporates and academia. This will be the platform for the development and deployment of AI and robotics companies working on Agentic and Physical AI. “This AI Superpark paves the way for a grander and more ambitious project of launching a 70-acre AI city in future,” Banerjee said.

For pure-play AI startups, the requirements are clear — talent, ecosystem, capital, go-to-market support, and enterprise adoption. Although India has a deep talent pool, significant gaps in other areas create a bottleneck for startups. Many Indian founders end up building globally successful companies but only after relocating to the US for better access to capital and ecosystem support, pointed out the cofounder.

“With Bharat1, we are trying to resolve this imbalance. We have a pragmatic goal that even if 10% of such companies could be retained in India, it would create a strong foundation and trigger a virtuous cycle of attracting more founders and investors over time. The approach is to bring all key stakeholders together in one physical location, enabling collaboration, access, and scale within a unified ecosystem,” he said. 

The focus will be on stress-testing AI and other intelligent frameworks, creating validation systems for physical and agentic AI, and developing city-scale AI models.

Some of the partners associated with the AI Superpark include Indian neocloud provider Neysa, think tank iSpirit, Indian AI Research Organisation (IAIRO), Security, Privacy & AI Research Centre, and cloud connectivity services firm Lightstorm.

The B1 AI Superpark offers connectivity of up to 400 GBps to all AI clouds with less than 1ms latency, which means that the time taken for data transfer, which is critical for training models, running experiments, and deploying AI applications, is reduced from hours to seconds. 

Through the partnerships with NVIDIA and other startups, Superpark will get access to computing software stack, compute infrastructure and domain expertise.

At full capacity, the whole building can host 7,000-8,000 people. Since its launch in February, the AI Superpark has had over 25 startups working out of the facility. In the next few months, the number is expected to cross 60. 

Fertile Ground for Collabs, Talent 

The steering committee of B1 AI Superpark reviews applications for startups looking to set up an office there. While the process is largely invite-based, it remains fairly open, with a clear emphasis on companies working on deeptech.

There is a structured membership programme with different tiers, where entry can happen through buildathons as well as a formal selection process to assess and establish eligibility. In April, the company launched the first iteration of Build for Humanity Buildathon, inviting developers, researchers, and startups to build solutions to some of the most critical AI-centric challenges.

One of the earliest startups to set up shop there was NeuroDX, which works in the space of brain mapping for enabling early, affordable detection of neurological disorders, such as epilepsy, dementia, Alzheimer’s, and depression. One of the 12 startups selected under the IndiaAI Mission, NeuroDX, has recently launched its 400 Mn-parameter brain foundation model called MANAS-1. The startup was founded three years ago by cofounders Siddharth Panwar and Kailash Sati.

“Umakant (Soni) and I go back a long way when we co-founded Vimagino. I have seen his work with ARTPARK, which follows a similar idea in a non-profit form. We believe bringing startups, researchers, and academicians into one place enables strong cross-pollination of ideas, accelerating both research and product development. With few people in India working on foundational AI, concentrating talent helps diffuse learning faster. It also simplifies hiring and discovery — talent and investors know where to go, creating a focused ecosystem that can drive a self-sustaining innovation flywheel,” said chief technology officer Sandeep Singh.

Energy-based early-stage startup Nuspark was incubated at Bharat1 AI. Akanksha Kumar met Rahul Kulshreshth at the Superpark while launching their brainchild Nuspark .

“We have benefited from the network here, including mentorship, customers, and investors. Our aim is also to make Bharat1 our customer for its next phase of expansion into the AI city, where we will take care of their energy needs,” Akanksha said.

From Artpark to AI Superpark

Cofounders of Bharat1 come from a strong AI background. Banerjee and Soni had earlier launched AI Foundry, a venture studio focussed on building leapfrog AI companies and ecosystems globally.

Their next venture was ARTPARK, a Section 8 (not-for-profit) company set up jointly with IISc (Indian Institute of Science), with funding from the Centre’s DST (Department of Science & Technology) and the Karnataka IT department to create deeptech startups in AI and robotics from India’s academic ecosystem. ARTPARK is part of the NMICPS Mission of the Government of India and is currently nurturing an ecosystem of close to 20 AI startups.

Soni also co-founded pi Ventures, an AI-focussed early-stage venture fund that has backed companies such as Sigtuple, Niramai, and Locus.sh. He also co-founded the AI chatbot company Vimagino around 2009–10.

The third cofounder, Sireesh Kupendra, brings real estate muscle to the team. He is the director of his family-owned RGA Infra, which oversees over 10 Mn square feet of real-asset platforms across India. The current B1 AI Superpark is located within the group’s Whitefield-based RGA Techpark.

Superpark plans to expand into an AI City projected to house 25,000 AI researchers and builders on campus, “each with agentic digital twins (software agents), anchored with digitised human identity, enabling a form of Universal Basic Intelligence (UBI) at city scale, along with physical AI twins (robots, AVs, embodied systems) working seamlessly together”, as per the company’s future plans.

This ‘city’ is expected to generate one exabyte of multimodal data annually, according to the founders.

The company spokesperson stated that a significant investment has already been made towards the Superpark, without disclosing exact figures. As per earlier media reports, an investment of $650 Mn is expected to go into building the AI City, which is slated to come up over the next couple of years. Out of this, $250 Mn will be in equity and $400 Mn in debt.

The AI City Initiatives

India, one of the fastest-growing AI-ready nations with its $7.63 Bn landscape expanding at a whopping 42.2% a year to reach $131.31 Bn by 2032, is exploring such AI City initiatives to create dedicated centres for AI, infrastructure, and employment. 

In Lucknow, Invest UP is developing a 258 acre campus, with an over 20 acre Phase I focussed on integrating AI hardware, software, and commercial ecosystems.

Down South in Kerala, Kochi is set to host a 300 Acre AI-powered township, where centralised AI systems will manage traffic, waste, and utilities. In Andhra Pradesh’s Visakhapatnam, plans are underway for an AI hub featuring data centres and undersea connectivity, elevated by Google’s $15 Bn investment to build its largest AI infrastructure hub outside the US. 

These projects aim to co-locate AI research, startups, and enterprises, supported by advanced digital infrastructure. Beyond innovation, they are expected to generate large-scale employment and help position India as a global AI powerhouse.

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