Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
What the numbers actually say $676 million across 57 deals — that is Inc42's tally for Indian AI-native startups in January–June 2026, up more than 4x from $162 million across 30 deals in H1 2025, with deal count up 90% to a six-month record. The average cheque nearly doubled — roughly $11.9 million per deal, against $5.4 million a year earlier. Bigger cheques, and far more of them. AI outran the wider market — the trackers cannot even agree on the direction of overall Indian startup funding in H1 2026: Tracxn logged $7.2 billion, up 12%; Entrackr $7.4 billion; Inc42's own count fell 9% to $5.2 billion. On all three, though, AI was the fastest-growing segment by a wide margin. The gap is still enormous — London's AI startups raised roughly $12 billion in the first seven months of the…
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