India, March 13 -- In the face of global geopolitical shifts, Indian VCs and startup investors are increasingly seeing AI and SaaS investments as the moat for the Indian startup ecosystem in competing against big tech giants globally.

As international markets grapple with supply chain disruptions and economic uncertainties, India's SaaS sector in particular has the opportunity to become a symbol of resilience and innovation. We are already seeing signs of an AI and SaaS convergence, thanks to newer and improved large language models emerging from AI giants such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta.

But the entry of DeepSeek and smaller language models has upended the competitive landscape a fair bit, and added more fuel to the AI fire,...