Meet the Companies Already Hiring India's AI Talent

India Japan Kaizen — AI Bridge Series, Part 2

Part 1 of this series laid out the gap in its plainest form: Japan pouring roughly $7 billion in dedicated government money into AI over five years, on top of SoftBank's own $60 billion-plus bet on OpenAI, while projecting a 220,000-person domestic IT talent shortfall; India holding the world's second-largest AI talent pool by the Stanford AI Index, and losing more of it to net outflow than any other country on Earth. We closed that post with the honest math: a 500-person government mobility target sitting inside a 220,000-person hole is closer to a single planeload than a bridge. This week we went looking for something more specific than the macro numbers — the actual companies already hiring or investing in Indian AI talent today, and the concrete channels an individual engineer, researcher, or founder would need to know about to reach them. Several things have moved just since Part 1 published.

Fujitsu, NTT Data, and SoftBank Are Already Building AI Teams in India

Bengaluru already has three live examples worth knowing by name. Fujitsu Research of India (FRIPL), which formally opened its current Bengaluru campus in January 2025, has grown past 400 dedicated researchers working on AI, machine learning, and quantum software alongside Indian universities — not outsourced coding seats, but Fujitsu's own research staff. NTT Data launched a GCC Innovation Acceleration Program in October 2025 aimed at helping more than 50 global companies build or scale offshore hubs in India over the next three years, and is separately expanding its own Bengaluru Innovation Centre — one of eleven worldwide — specifically around agentic AI, digital twin, and quantum computing work. And a few kilometers away, SoftBank-owned chip designer Graphcore is partway through a committed £1 billion, decade-long build-out with its first 100 AI-chip engineering roles — spanning silicon logical design, physical design, and verification — open now, on the way to 500. None of these are future-tense pipelines; they are live hiring pages for people building AI itself, not staffing someone else's offshore desk.

The First Direct AI-to-AI Partnership: Sarvam and Preferred Networks

At the Modi-Takaichi summit on 2 July 2026, Indian foundation-model startup Sarvam AI and Japanese AI lab Preferred Networks signed an agreement covering the AI technology stack together — large language models and next-generation AI development, company to company, rather than government program to government program. The same summit welcomed a memorandum between IIT Bombay, the BharatGen Technology Foundation, and Japan's National Institute of Informatics for joint LLM research. Neither is large in dollar terms yet, and both matter for a different reason: they're the first evidence in this series that the AI relationship might run through something other than IT-services giants or diplomacy — an Indian AI company and a Japanese AI lab actually building on the same stack.

Governments Just Wired In an Actual Employment Channel

That same 2 July summit also produced something more mechanical. Japan's METI and India's IT ministry signed a formal Memorandum of Cooperation on AI — signed on 26 June, announced at the summit — that names, inside its text, "provision of employment information to AI professionals seeking jobs in each other's countries," alongside support for Japanese and Indian companies expanding into each other's markets. It sits under the broader Japan-India AI Cooperation Initiative (JAI), launched at the 2025 annual summit and given its own dedicated AI Strategic Dialogue in April 2026. Fifteen separate memoranda between Japanese and Indian companies in AI were signed at the same event. None of this moves the 500-person mobility number yet — but it's the first time the two governments have built something resembling an actual information channel for individual job-seekers, rather than only a headline target.

For Startups and Investors: A Corridor With Names Attached

For founders rather than engineers, late August brought the clearest list yet. At an India-Japan Startup Roundtable in Tokyo on 26 August, India's commerce minister proposed a four-part framework:

• Deep-Tech Capital Corridor. A joint fund meant to move patient capital into early-stage research and commercialization.
• Two-Way Innovation Bridge. Links universities, incubators, and testing facilities in both countries.
• Manufacturing and Technology Integration. Pairs India's scale with Japan's precision manufacturing.
• Joint Startup Pitching Platforms. Regular meetings between Indian founders and Japanese investors.

About 40 Japanese firms sent representatives, and for once the readout named them: SPARX Group, MUFG Innovation Partners, Beyond Next Ventures, Incubate Fund Asia, Mizuho Financial Group, SBI Investment, Fujitsu, and DG Daiwa Ventures among others, alongside several smaller deep-tech-focused funds. India also floated a roughly $1 billion second Fund of Funds specifically for deep tech, with an open invitation for Japanese investors to co-invest. For an Indian AI startup, that's the first time in this series a Japanese-side list has looked less like "SoftBank" and more like a set of firms actually worth a cold email.

What's Missing

Every one of these is still a name-level answer, not a route. A researcher now knows Fujitsu, NTT Data, and Graphcore are hiring AI talent in Bengaluru, but still applies through the same crowded public portals as anyone else. A founder has a list of roughly 40 firms that showed up in Tokyo, but no shared directory of who at each one actually covers AI, or how to get fifteen minutes with them. The METI-IT ministry MoU promises employment-information exchange, but what that exchange looks like from an engineer's desk in Pune or Hyderabad hasn't been published anywhere yet. The gap Part 1 named hasn't closed — it's just gotten a great deal more specific about exactly who, and what, would need to be connected to close it.

If you're an AI engineer or researcher evaluating one of the companies above, or a startup founder who wants an introduction to any of the investors on that Tokyo list — get in touch. Making exactly that kind of connection is what India Japan Kaizen exists for.

This is Part 2 of India Japan Kaizen's AI Bridge Series, publishing weekly. Part 3 will look at what compensation, visas, and Japanese-language requirements actually look like for Indian engineers who've taken these roles, and profile a few who've already made the move.