Nikhil Kamath made his first significant money trading equities, a domain where pattern recognition and probabilistic thinking are survival skills. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that he has developed a clear and specific thesis about AI investing — one that is less about chasing the hottest models and more about identifying the structural advantages that will determine which companies win over a decade-long horizon.
The Thesis in Brief
"Most people are investing in AI the way they invested in the internet in 1999," Kamath says. "They are buying the excitement, not the business. The companies that will matter in ten years are not necessarily the ones with the most impressive demos today. They are the ones building durable advantages — proprietary data, distribution, regulatory relationships, domain expertise — that will be hard to replicate even as the underlying models improve."
This framework leads Kamath to be sceptical of pure-play foundation model companies and more interested in companies that are using AI to transform specific industries where India has structural advantages. Healthcare, agriculture, financial services, education: these are sectors where India has both massive unmet need and the kind of domain complexity that creates defensible moats.
The Sectors He Is Most Excited About
Kamath's most enthusiastic bets are in healthcare AI. India's healthcare system is characterised by a severe shortage of specialists — there are fewer than 100,000 radiologists for a population of 1.4 billion — and a massive burden of preventable disease. "The healthcare AI opportunity in India is not just large," he says. "It is different from the healthcare AI opportunity in the United States or Europe. The constraints are different, the use cases are different, the regulatory environment is different. Companies that understand these differences and build for them will have advantages that global competitors cannot easily replicate."
His second area of focus is financial services AI. India's financial inclusion story — the rapid expansion of banking, insurance, and investment services to previously unserved populations — is one of the most significant economic developments of the past decade. AI is accelerating this expansion by making it possible to serve customers who were previously too expensive to serve.
Why He Thinks the Next Google Could Come from Bangalore
"Google's dominance is built on search, which is built on the English-language internet," he says. "The next platform will be built on AI that understands human intent across all languages and modalities. The companies that are best positioned to build that platform are the ones that are solving the hardest version of the problem — and the hardest version of the problem is India." He points to the work being done at Sarvam AI, Krutrim, and several smaller companies as evidence that Indian researchers and engineers are capable of frontier AI work. "Indian AI companies need investors who understand that this is a ten-year journey, not a three-year journey."
His Own Portfolio
Kamath has made angel investments in over a dozen Indian AI companies, spanning healthcare, agriculture, financial services, and developer tools. He describes his portfolio construction philosophy as focused on founders rather than sectors. "I invest in people who have spent years understanding a specific problem before they started a company. The best AI founders I have met are not people who saw the ChatGPT wave and decided to start an AI company. They are people who have been working on a specific problem for years and who now have access to AI tools that make their solution possible."