Innovation in India walks a tightrope between promise and reality. Despite a booming startup ecosystem and a deep talent pool, entrepreneurs often find themselves up against a wall of systemic apathy — bureaucratic inertia, meager R&D support, and risk-averse investors.
Nowhere is this struggle more sharply captured than in a recent Reddit post by a founder whose AI-powered autonomous retail startup hit a dead end — not due to lack of capability, but a broken funding system unwilling to back anything beyond quick wins.
In a blunt Reddit post titled “Indian startups will never be innovative,” the co-founder of a tech startup building autonomous, AI-powered retail stores laid bare the hurdles Indian innovators face.
“Hi, I am a Co-Founder of an Indian Startup which is working on building autonomous stores using Vision AI and Sensor Fusion for 24×7 retail,” the founder wrote. “We are the only company in India that has built a Vision AI foundational model for identifying people and tracking people… Our global competitor Amazon GO charges $200K for setup of such a store while we can do it for just $7500. Yet we lost because we are based in India.”
Despite building a lean product at a fraction of global costs, the team of three couldn’t attract funding. The founder shared blunt rejections from Indian VCs:
- “VC: Indians don’t need such stores, qcommerce hai hamare paas (we have qcommerce).”
- “VC: Don’t go for innovation, yaha pe koi paisa nai dega (no one will give you money for this). Just drop this.”
Some demanded traction far beyond a seed-stage startup’s scope. “VC: Get $100k to $200k ARR then we can talk,” one told them. The founder pushed back: “We are building in AI with no outside team, how do we scale up there without any backing?”
Disillusioned, the post ended on a grim note: “Our VC sector is built around funding coffee, drinks, shirts, dashboards-based services or AI companies which actually work on ChatGPT. Indian startups will never be innovative due to this… Once we are completely dead Indian companies will tie up with some foreign company (Amazon GO), pay them 10X and say that we are innovating in India.”
The post quickly sparked debate.
One user highlighted cultural and market mismatch: “India is not the right market for this business at the moment… Go on the street and ask ten people if they will be okay to let camera track and identify them.”
Another pointed to structural issues: “Every VC wants to see either a IIM or IIT tag… No one wants to appreciate the sweat it takes to do the R&D and build the groundbreaking tech.”
Others offered cautious encouragement and advice on partnerships, grants and investor alignment.
But the harshest commentary struck at deeper cultural roots. “R&D spend of top Indian companies is nowhere near global peers… Indians live close to the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid… Self checkouts won’t work here… Mechanisation, automation, and DIY haven’t picked up, will never pick up.”
The post ended with a sobering assessment: innovation in India often fails not for lack of intellect or effort, but because the ecosystem — from VCs to markets to cultural behaviour — isn’t built to support it.
