From Services to Products
For fifty years, India's technology identity was defined by services — talented engineers delivering work designed elsewhere, at competitive cost. That identity is changing fundamentally, and the change is happening faster than most global observers have recognised.
A Growing Product Ecosystem
India is now the third-largest startup ecosystem in the world by count, with over 1,17,000 DPIIT-recognised startups as of 2025. An increasing proportion of these startups are building software products — SaaS platforms, developer tools, vertical AI applications, and API-first businesses — designed in India and sold globally.
Proof at Scale
Zepto, Groww, Razorpay, Postman, Browserstack, and Freshworks are among the companies that have demonstrated what India-built, globally-competitive software products look like at scale. Freshworks became the first Indian SaaS company to IPO on Nasdaq. Postman has 30 million developers using a product built entirely in Bangalore.
A Maturing Talent Pipeline
The engineering talent pipeline has matured to support this shift. IITs and NITs are producing engineers who have grown up building on AWS, deploying on Kubernetes, and shipping code through CI/CD pipelines — not learning to do so in their first job.
Key Takeaway
For enterprises building digital products, the cost-vs-quality trade-off that historically pushed product development to the US or Europe no longer applies in the same way.
