The Next Wave of Indian Startups Won’t Be Apps, It’ll Be Invisible Agents

In the first wave of India’s startup revolution, we built apps. Swiggy put meals on screens, Zerodha put markets in pockets, and CRED wrapped rewards around credit cards. A generation of Indian entrepreneurs solved visible, mobile-first consumer problems.

But the next wave? It won’t be apps at all.

It’ll be invisible agents. AI entities that exist in the background, not as places that you go to but as things that come to you to help you along. These agents will talk, text, negotiate, draft, compare, and close working across channels, products, and platforms. Not flashy icons on your home screen, but silent force multipliers stitched into your everyday.

I’ve seen this wave up close as a builder, founder, and curious traveler in the AI underground, from India to Silicon Valley. And I believe this is India’s second big moment.

The Shift Happening In Interfaces

Apps were built for interaction. You open them, tap around, swipe, scroll, and eventually get what you want. Agents are built for delegation. You tell them what you need, and they do the rest quietly, often autonomously.

For example, in my own experience, we created an AI voice agent that handles incoming calls, qualifies leads, and even schedules appointments through natural human language. No app, no onboarding, no learning curve. It just works. The experience is tangible, not visual.

The transition from interaction to delegation is not merely a cosmetic one. It unlocks entirely new startup primitives: ambient workflows, voice-first commerce, API-native AI, and ultra-personalised automation.

India’s Edge Is Friction Tolerance

While Silicon Valley obsesses over AGI debates and futuristic demos, India has a more grounded opportunity: building AI agents that solve today’s inefficiencies at scale.

Missed calls, WhatsApp groups and handwritten ledgers continue to be the backbone of our local businesses. If apps were about digitisation, agents will be about orchestration — automating follow-ups,  extracting data from PDFs, chatting with 500 customers in 3 hours and sorting inventory by voice.

In my most recent projects working with Indian grocery retailers, we created call-based voice agents to take daily orders, answer questions and update sheets in real time. It was not glamorous, but it was fantastically effective. No UI. No downloads. Just outcome

And here’s the kicker: Indian users have high friction tolerance. They’re okay with a bit of latency, minor hallucinations, or occasional retries as long as the outcome is valuable. This makes India a perfect sandbox to prototype the future of agentic software.

Agents Will Be Built Differently

Startups in this wave won’t look like traditional SaaS or D2C companies. They’ll be messy, experimental, and deeply integrated into vertical workflows. Founders will ship GPT wrappers in week one and rebuild infra in month three. What matters is velocity, iteration, and embeddedness.

In my own journey building AI tools I’ve realised: agents are not one-shot products. They evolve with the customer. You start with a script, and end up with an AI employee.

This also means the founder profile will shift. The next Indian unicorn founder may not be an IIT graduate who raised a $5 Mn seed. It might be a solo builder in Bhubaneswar who stitched ElevenLabs, Deepgram, and GPT into a logistics assistant that now handles 1000 daily calls.

The Quiet Export As A Backstage Builder

As foreign founders chase billion-dollar valuations; Indian builders have an underrated opportunity — to become the backstage for global agents. 

We understand constraints. We know how to build cheap, scrappy, and resilient systems. Our engineering talent especially in services, workflow automation, and vertical SaaS is ready.

I’ve already seen Indian teams building agents for US therapists, realtors, recruiters, and creators. These aren’t services. They’re systems. Invisible assistants powered by Indian code and intelligence running in the background of American businesses.

This could be India’s biggest software export yet not a tool, but a worker.

What Comes Next?

Startups in this new world won’t ask “What app should I build?”

They’ll ask, “What human process should I automate end-to-end?”

They’ll study how a store manager coordinates deliveries, how a teacher fills report cards, how a CA files GST returns and builds agents that do the job, not just assist it.

They won’t need a big launch. Just a quiet link, a working demo, a saved hour and a happy customer.

That’s the new stack.

Invisible agents. Visible impact. And a future that isn’t installed but embedded.