The AI Gold Rush: Others are building faster than you can imagine

Praveen Bhadada

“AI is not coming. It’s already here. The question is – are you building with it, or watching others do it faster than you ever imagined?”

We are at a pivotal moment in history. Generative AI is not just another technology wave—it’s a platform shift. Much like the mobile revolution in the early 2010s, GenAI is redefining how we work, create, build, and compete.

But this time, the window is smaller. Much smaller.

The New Gold Rush Has Begun

Consider this: OpenAI’s ChatGPT reached 100 million users in just 2 months. That’s 15x faster than Instagram and 25x faster than Uber. In 2024, more than $56 billion was invested in GenAI startups globally, and according to IA research, 1 in 4 venture dollars globally is now going into AI. It’s not a trend. It’s a tectonic shift.

Let’s talk about Ghibli – ChatGPTs image tool. Soon after launch it added 1 million subscribers in just 1 hour and helped ChatGPT average weekly users breach the 150 million mark for the first time, while also increase in app subscription revenue to reach record high - all by combining publicly available LLMs with a smart, niche use case: AI-generated anime stories with Studio Ghibli vibes.

That’s the new normal. This is not a story of exceptional luck—it’s a glimpse of what’s now possible when distribution, creativity, and intelligence come together.

The real question is not how Ghibli did it. It’s why more Indian founders aren’t even trying. Most Indian startups are still treating AI like a “feature” and not a “foundational muscle.”

This is our wake-up call.

From Building Apps to Building Intelligence

India has traditionally been great at scaling SaaS and services. But GenAI demands a new playbook.

It’s no longer about building faster dashboards or automating one more workflow. The startups that will survive this decade are the ones rethinking entire categories using intelligence as infrastructure.

Ask yourself:

• Are you training your own models or relying entirely on APIs?

• Are you owning your data flywheel or outsourcing it to LLM wrappers?

• Is AI at the core of your business model—or just a nice-to-have feature on your pitch deck?

Most importantly: Are you building things that couldn’t have been built without AI?

The Founder’s Edge: Indian Startups Have One Shot

India has one of the largest talent pools in data and AI—over 600,000 professionals with AI/ML experience. The infrastructure is catching up too—cloud credits, developer tools, open-source LLMs, and GPT-powered copilots are now accessible even to 2-person teams.

But the opportunity isn’t just technical. It’s behavioral.

Startups in India are uniquely positioned to build AI-native companies because:

• Problem Density: Our market is full of high-friction, low-efficiency problems.

• Frugal Innovation: We’ve always done more with less.

• Democratized Demand: Tier 2/3 businesses are hungry for productivity solutions, not just automation.

If we can marry GenAI with India’s real economy—logistics, healthcare, education, agriculture—the result won’t just be unicorns. It will be a new kind of GDP multiplier.

Lessons from the Trenches: What I’ve Seen

Working closely with AI-focused startups, enterprise CXOs, and PE-backed companies across the US and India, here’s what I’ve learned:

• The best founders use AI to augment human ability, not replace it. CoPilot-style UX is the future.

• Moats are shifting from access to AI to ownership of niche datasets. Think vertical AI, not horizontal LLMs.

• Business model innovation matters more than model size. Can you monetize AI as a service, not just embed it?

• Speed wins. Most GenAI products that win do so not because of perfection, but because of iteration velocity.

As Ethan Mollick wrote in Cointelligence, “You are not competing with AI. You are competing with people who use AI better than you.”

Where Should India Accelerator Startups Focus?

If you’re part of the IA ecosystem—building, mentoring, investing—here are 5 imperatives:

1. Build with AI at the center, not at the edges. Treat it like a co-founder.

2. Invest in talent and training, fast. GenAI literacy should be a boardroom agenda item.

3. Test new GTM models. AI is rewriting cost structures—experiment with usage-based pricing, outcome-based SaaS, and AI-as-a-Service.

4. Create partnerships with data-rich incumbents. That’s your shortcut to defensibility.

5. Tell a differentiated story. The world doesn’t need another ChatGPT wrapper—it needs contextual, purposeful, and localized AI.

The Final Word: Don’t Wait for the Playbook

The most exciting thing about this moment? There is no “best practice” yet. We are writing the rules as we go.

So if you’re a startup founder, this is not the time to play safe. Build with courage. Fail fast. But above all, stay obsessed with solving a real problem using real AI.

India doesn’t just need more unicorns. It needs AI-native companies that solve India-first problems at global scale.

Because this time… we’re not catching up. We have a chance to lead.