NDTV Profit has unveiled the nominees for the Business Leadership Awards 2026, recognising leaders and organisations driving excellence across business, finance, technology, governance and sustainability. Among the 12 award categories, the AI Champion of the Year award honours companies shaping India's artificial intelligence ecosystem through breakthrough products, foundational models and sovereign AI infrastructure.
The six nominees reflect the breadth of India's rapidly evolving AI landscape.
Sarvam
Sarvam has emerged as a leader in multilingual large language models, building voice-first AI designed for 22 Indian languages. The company recently showcased India-trained foundation models with 30-billion and 105-billion parameters at the IndiaAI Impact Summit and has raised $300-$350 million in fresh funding from investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, Nvidia and Amazon. Its focus on regional languages addresses a critical gap left by many global AI models.
Neysa
Neysa is building sovereign AI infrastructure through GPU-accelerated cloud services. The company aims to deploy more than 20,000 GPUs under the IndiaAI Mission, offering Indian enterprises a domestic alternative for AI model training and deployment. Earlier this year, it secured a $1.2 billion equity and debt financing round led by Blackstone.
Fractal
Fractal, one of India's earliest enterprise AI companies, has strengthened its position with the launch of Fathom-R1 14B, an open-source reasoning model focused on mathematics and structured analytics. The unicorn is reportedly preparing for a public listing later this year as it expands its enterprise AI offerings.
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Qure.ai
Qure.ai has established itself as a global leader in medical vision AI. Its FDA-cleared diagnostic tools, deployed across more than 105 countries, help detect conditions such as tuberculosis, strokes and lung diseases using chest X-rays. The company has also been recognised for developing AI solutions that function effectively in low-connectivity healthcare settings.
Karya
Karya has pioneered ethical AI data infrastructure by creating high-quality multilingual datasets for underrepresented languages and communities. Through initiatives such as Project Vaani and Samiksha, the social enterprise is helping improve AI performance across Indic languages while ensuring fair compensation for data contributors.
Emergent
Emergent represents the next generation of AI-native software development. Founded in 2025, the company has built a platform that converts natural language prompts into production-ready software and autonomous digital agents. Its rapid growth to millions of users and applications highlights rising demand for AI-powered software creation.
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