India has narrowed the AI gap with Silicon Valley, says Elevation’s Krishna Mehra

SAN FRANCISCO: India is no longer a decade behind Silicon Valley in building with artificial intelligence, Elevation Capital’s AI partner Krishna Mehra said, arguing that founders in Bengaluru and other Indian hubs are now closer to the global frontier and should aim to build category-leading companies rather than “number two or three” players.“In the SaaS days… SF was maybe 10-plus years ahead in AI,” Mehra said in an interview in San Francisco. “We’ve narrowed the gap significantly… maybe we are six months behind in India or one year behind,” he said, underscoring how much the distance has reduced from earlier tech waves.Mehra, an IIT Kharagpur alumnus who has previously co-founded Capillary Technologies and food-tech startup Taro, joined Elevation in 2024 to deepen the firm’s India-US corridor focus.The sharper opportunity for Indian founders in the AI cycle, Mehra said, comes from how products are being rebuilt “from first principles” rather than incrementally improving legacy software. In previous waves, companies could build in India, replicate established product patterns and move later for go-to-market scale. With AI, he said, user workflows and product capabilities can change materially every few months, making early market feedback critical.“Products can be rethought completely,” Mehra said, contrasting older shifts such as on-premise to cloud, where interfaces and usage patterns remained broadly comparable. In AI-native software, he said, founders need faster iteration with the end market they are building for.That shift is also changing founder geography, he said. While India’s advanced tech talent can help founders build early hypotheses quickly, he said many teams are moving to the US earlier than before “pretty much at a pre-seed level” to validate and sharpen their thesis with global customers and communities.“The number of meetups and AI sessions and mixers here is crazy,” he said, describing Silicon Valley’s “talent density” and the speed at which founders can access feedback. He also pointed to a culture where “people will open their doors” for a compelling insight, including startups working closely from customer locations.Mehra’s investment lens at Elevation, he said, is shaped by a belief that the ingredients for global outcomes are stronger in India today than a decade ago: deeper product talent, better understanding of go-to-market, more sophisticated local customers even if willingness to pay is lower than in the US, more risk capital, and higher founder ambition.“If those ingredients are there, can we build some category defining companies? Absolutely,” he said, adding that India should aim for “global number one” outcomes rather than settling for smaller positions.Mehra also flagged how quickly assumptions can flip in the AI market, citing how competitive dynamics in areas like software engineering tools can change as model providers move to capture more value. The key question for investors and founders, he said, is whether value is coming purely from the underlying model or whether the application layer can build durable differentiation, even if the path to value capture becomes clearer over time.