Peak XV's Anandan Predicts 25–30 Indian AI Unicorns by 2030

India will produce 25 to 30 AI unicorns by 2030, and the first $10-billion-plus Indian AI company is roughly four or five years away, according to Rajan Anandan, Managing Director of Peak XV Partners. He made the claim in an interview with BusinessLine during a visit to Chennai for the ninth edition of The Better Call Show by Idea Pattarai.

Anandan's bullishness on AI sits inside a broader argument: India can become the startup IPO capital of the world. The qualification matters, because he concedes the current market is not there yet.

"It would be great to have a market that's going up and to the right, but it's not right now. However, India is the number one IPO market in the world, especially for start-ups," Anandan said. "Of course, valuations have to be reasonable, you have to have profitability, and consistent execution is what will get rewarded."

That is a promise with a condition attached. Public markets, in his telling, will reward Indian tech founders only if they arrive with sober price tags and proven earnings—two things many of the 2021-era listings lacked.

What is Peak XV's actual IPO track record?

The numbers Anandan cites are concrete. Peak XV has taken 38 companies public. In the last 18 months, the firm counted eight or nine IPOs, including six in calendar year 2025. He also claimed a distinction: Peak XV is the only venture firm to have staged five IPOs in five weeks in 2025.

He described the firm's coming IPO pipeline as one of its strongest in years. Startup IPO windows have opened significantly since 2021, he said, reversing the drought that followed the tech listing frenzy and its aftermath.

Why does Anandan think AI is India's opening?

His case rests on cost structure rather than frontier research. India is best positioned, he argued, to build economical, right-sized AI products matched to how Indian users actually consume technology—leaner models for leaner wallets.

"I think we are probably four or five years away from having a very large, 10 billion plus market cap AI companies...we will have 25-30 AI unicorns by 2030, easily," Anandan said.

Note what he did not say: no timeline for revenue, no named candidates, and no valuation methodology behind the unicorn count.

He praised the IndiaAI Mission but pushed the government to go further, combining grants for AI startups and researchers with long-term commitments to companies supplying compute capacity. Grants alone, the implication runs, will not fund the GPUs.

Is India's deep tech push underfunded?

Anandan says yes, by a factor of five. Drawing on figures in his new book, The Lift-Off Nation, he laid out the gap: India spends about 0.65 percent of GDP on research and development, against 2.5 percent for China and 3.5 percent for the United States. In dollar terms, India spends roughly $18 billion a year on R&D when it should be spending about $100 billion.

"We are off by a factor of five," he said—equivalent to a shortfall of more than $80 billion annually, or roughly five times the current budget.

He called the ₹1 lakh crore RDI Fund a game changer because it is designed to pull private-sector money into research. But he flagged a second bottleneck: India needs a far larger pipeline of researchers capable of commercialising scientific advances, not just producing them.

What does this mean for Chennai and for Peak XV?

Anandan named Chennai as a candidate to become India's deep tech hub, though he urged local entrepreneurs to publicise their successes more aggressively on public platforms—a soft spot in a city he clearly rates. After the fireside chat, he spent time with portfolio founders of MudhalVC, hearing pitches and giving feedback.

Peak XV's own deep tech positioning is already visible. The firm holds four semiconductor companies in its portfolio plus several space tech investments, and Anandan signalled more to come: "We are broad-based investors...But we will do more in semiconductors, in space, and in AI."

His book frames the next decade of Indian entrepreneurship around massive scale, high-growth consumer sectors, large domestic brands and deep technological innovation. Whether India closes an $80-billion-a-year R&D gap in time to cash that thesis is the question his unicorns forecast leaves unanswered.