We've been building in India long enough to know this: the founders here don't think small. So, last week at the India AI Impact Summit in Delhi, we announced a $5 billion commitment to India over the next five years, one of the largest venture capital commitments ever made here. It's our way of championing the ambition that has defined the region, and our clearest statement yet that we believe this country will produce the defining technology companies of the next decade.

From Seed to Scale

Our $5 billion is venture capital in the fullest sense: seed through growth-stage investing, company creation, and strategic investments in founders from day one. The sectors we're focused on are where we see India's greatest opportunities - artificial intelligence, healthcare, defense technology, fintech, and consumer technology –areas in which India's founders are already setting an ambitious pace.

The Billion-Person Advantage

What sets India apart to us goes beyond the size of its market or the quality of its engineering talent. It's the nature of the problems Indian founders choose to tackle. 

India's founders don't adapt foreign architectures to local conditions. They invent new ones. They build for billion-person complexity first - cost sensitivity, linguistic diversity, infrastructure constraints, massive scale with thin margins-then scale those solutions to reshape global markets. That's a fundamentally different orientation than what you see in most startup ecosystems, and it produces enduring companies built in India for the world.

Nowhere is this more relevant than in artificial intelligence. India's real AI opportunity lies in deploying AI at population scale, not in winning a frontier model race. The country's digital public infrastructure, massive domestic market, and deep services workforce we believe make it uniquely positioned to lead in scaling AI across citizen services, healthcare, defense, financial services, and manufacturing. India didn't participate in the fintech revolution - it leapfrogged the legacy systems that slowed everyone else down. The same dynamic is now unfolding in AI. We're putting $5 billion behind that conviction.

Building Platform-Defining Companies

Our roots in India run deep. When Venture Highway merged with General Catalyst nearly two years ago, we set out to build one of the most powerful venture platforms for the next generation of Indian entrepreneurs. Since then, our Bangalore office has been backing founders across Zepto, PB Health, Raphe, Jeh Aerospace, Pronto, and Ayr Energy. This $5 billion commitment is the next chapter of that work.

We run India as a fully integrated part of our global company, with the same ambition, same resources, and same accountability. That means Indian founders get access to everything General Catalyst has built across its global platform. We're building an ecosystem here that can attract the best entrepreneurial talent in the world, provide the support companies need to compete globally, and shape how entire industries evolve over the next two decades.

Turning Commitment Into Compounding Value

Alongside this capital commitment, we're developing an execution-oriented framework to accelerate AI adoption across India's priority sectors, bringing together builders and adopters to convert pilots into real deployments and ensuring that more AI value creation compounds inside India rather than flowing elsewhere. 

We will also continue the work of the General Catalyst Institute in India, which has spent the past year building government-innovation partnerships across allied nations, working to unlock the policy conditions that let great companies thrive in foundational industries.

This is India’s moment. We're here to build it.