India Tech Insider: Razorpay’s Vulcan AI Launch & The Deals That Matter Today

Razorpay just launched Vulcan, what they're calling India’s FIRST transformer-based AI model. Just last week in episode 115, Admin, we talked about how big AI bets were rewriting India’s tech story, and it looks like one of those bets just hit the table in a massive way. This isn't just using AI, this is building the foundational models themselves. Okay, so that’s the lead. But a lot is moving right now. Here’s a quick sweep of what else just changed. First, Microsoft just opened its largest data center hub in India. This isn't just more cloud storage; this is the heavy-duty infrastructure needed to power the next wave of AI, both for global companies operating in India and for domestic players like Razorpay. Then you have a major new partnership.

Adesso and Hitachi Digital Services are teaming up. Their goal? Use AI to connect Indian startups with European companies. It’s a cross-border play designed to get Indian innovation into legacy European enterprises. And the money is following. Piper Serica just raised an eight hundred crore rupee fund—that’s about a hundred million dollars—called the Bharat Tech Fund. And look at what they're targeting: semiconductors, AI infrastructure, space-tech, robotics. This isn't e-commerce or another food delivery app. This is capital flowing directly into deep, hard tech. Finally, the government is putting its weight behind this. They just greenlit Semicon 2.0, a fifteen-billion-dollar program to boost semiconductor design and manufacturing right here in India.

This is the hardware bedrock for everything else we’re seeing. But I want to go back to something that might seem less flashy, but is actually a bigger deal than any single product launch. It’s the India-UK Free Trade Agreement. Now, trade agreements can feel abstract, but this one is having a very, very real effect right now. Here's the delta. The number of Indian-owned companies in the UK just jumped from about twelve hundred in 2025 to over nineteen hundred this year. That’s a sixty percent increase in a single year. And a lot of them are tech, SaaS, and AI startups. So what changed? According to Hemin Bharucha at London & Partners, the FTA created a surge in interest because it suddenly made moving people and capital easier.

But here’s the really sharp take, from Sunitha Vishwanathan at Kae Capital. She said agreements like this matter less for what they immediately unlock, and more for the… PERMISSION structure they create. Think about that. For years, an Indian founder looking at London had to ask, "Should we even try?" It was a question of feasibility. Now, she says, the question has changed. It's not "if," it's "when and how." The default assumption has flipped. The path is now cleared, legally and financially. And it’s not just a feeling. There are concrete financial reasons this is happening. One provision in the FTA, the Double Contribution Convention, is set to save Indian firms and their workers over four thousand crore rupees—that’s half a billion dollars.

It basically stops them from having to pay into two social security systems at once. That's real money you can put back into hiring and R&D. So you have this wave of Indian startups like Newgen, which is building out its AI enterprise platform, now aggressively targeting Europe and North America. They’re not just selling to the world from India anymore. They are physically setting up shop, embedding themselves in their target markets, backed by a new legal and financial framework that makes it… well, not easy, but possible. The challenges of brand building and distribution are still there, of course. But the starting line just moved a thousand miles closer. This is a fundamental shift. It’s the next chapter after the domestic growth story.

You have the government building the on-ramp with programs like Semicon 2.0. You have VCs like Piper Serica funding the journey. And you have the startups themselves, now armed with their own foundational tech, walking through a door that was just unlocked. It’s a complete ecosystem firing on all cylinders. The domestic market is huge, yes, with over a billion internet users. But the real story today is that the ambition is no longer just domestic. It's about building in India, for the world, and doing it from everywhere.