Can Reliance be a world beater?

Reliance Industries, one of the few Indian companies to have crossed an annual revenue of $100 billion, has been getting deeper and deeper into technology. At the last AGM, Mukesh Ambani announced, “Breakthrough technologies and innovation have always been the greatest wealth creators for nations, as well as for corporates.” He added that the addition of the suite for tools and platforms—JioBrain saying, “I anticipate that by perfecting JioBrain within Reliance, we will create a powerful AI service platform that we can offer to other enterprises as well.”

Some time back Zoho founder Sreedhar Vembu had declared that increasing R&D spend was the duty of companies rather than governments.

Highlighting the increasing adoption of new technologies, Ambani further said, “We plan to establish gigawatt-scale AI-ready data centres.” This is towards India’s AI infrastructure. Last year, Reliance filed over 2,555 patents in multiple fields.

Reliance is on a high as the Competition Commission of India has approved the $8.5 billion Jio Cinema and Hotstar Disney+ India merger. While Netflix never really made major gains in India, Prime Video will struggle to compete with Reliance. Jeff Bezos is having it tough being a market leader in India with Amazon being second to Flipkart in the ecommerce space. That’s not taking away the cloud market leader status of AWS.

A field where India is a clear leader is quick commerce with the likes of Swiggy Instamart and Big Basket Now. In the latest round of funding, Zepto raised a cool $340 million, pushing its valuation past the $5 billion mark. Amazon India is looking to enter this space in 2025. 

Another ambitious billionaire is Bhavish Aggarwal who wants Ola to be the largest EV company in the world. That’s easier said than done as in the field of electric vehicles, it’s more about innovation than brute manufacturing strategies. A lot of R&D, patents and AI has to come into play. Interestingly Exponent Energy in a partnership with bus maker Veera Vahana is looking to charge a 13.5-meter-long bus in just 15 minutes.

The National Quantum Mission is looking to give grants to 15 startups. Quantum is important, not just AI. OYO, which has emerged as the third-largest hotel chain by room count, is looking to triple its net profit in FY25. 

Founding chairman of UIDAI (Aadhaar) and non-executive chairman Nandan Nilekani declared that all the startups that have been built on top of India’s digital public infrastructure have crossed $100 billion in valuation.

The Indian startup ecosystem in the world’s third largest and probably the fastest growing. We currently have 1.4 lakh recognized startups. It is the key to India becoming a $10 trillion economy in quick time.