NDTV Profit has unveiled the nominees for the Business Leadership Awards 2026, recognising leaders and organisations driving excellence across business, finance, technology, governance and sustainability. Among the 12 award categories, the AI Champion of the Year award specifically honours companies shaping India's artificial intelligence ecosystem through breakthrough products, foundational models and sovereign AI infrastructure. According to reports from NDTV Profit, these six nominees reflect the breadth of India's rapidly evolving AI landscape.
Sarvam has emerged as a leader in multilingual large language models, building voice-first AI designed for 22 Indian languages. The company recently showcased India-trained foundation models with 30-billion and 105-billion parameters at the IndiaAI Impact Summit and has raised $300-$350 million in fresh funding from investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, Nvidia and Amazon. As reported by NDTV Profit, its focus on regional languages addresses a critical gap left by many global AI models.
Neysa is building sovereign AI infrastructure through GPU-accelerated cloud services, aiming to deploy more than 20,000 GPUs under the IndiaAI Mission. The company offers Indian enterprises a domestic alternative for AI model training and deployment. According to NDTV Profit reports, earlier this year, it secured a $1.2 billion equity and debt financing round led by Blackstone, demonstrating significant institutional backing for AI infrastructure development.
Fractal, one of India's earliest enterprise AI companies, has strengthened its position with the launch of Fathom-R1 14B, an open-source reasoning model focused on mathematics and structured analytics. The unicorn made its stock market debut earlier this year as it expands its enterprise AI offerings. Qure.ai has established itself as a global leader in medical vision AI, with FDA-cleared diagnostic tools deployed across more than 105 countries for conditions including tuberculosis, strokes and lung diseases using chest X-rays. The company has also been recognised for developing AI solutions that function effectively in low-connectivity healthcare settings.
Karya has pioneered ethical AI data infrastructure by creating high-quality multilingual datasets for underrepresented languages and communities. Through initiatives such as Project Vaani and Samiksha, the social enterprise helps improve AI performance across Indic languages while ensuring fair compensation for data contributors. Emergent, founded in 2025, represents the next generation of AI-native software development, building a platform that converts natural language prompts into production-ready software and autonomous digital agents, with rapid growth to millions of users and applications.
