Insights

Vikram Vaidyanathan

Investor, Managing Director at Z47

Yesterday, the day started with 100+ CTOs and AI builders coming together for our CTO workshop with OpenAI. Wulfie, Nikunj, and Thomas walked us through implementation patterns and best practices with Agent Builder, GPT-5 and the Realtime API. We kicked things off with one simple idea: India’s AI story is entering its slingshot moment. Four drivers:

Ashwin Kannan Pandian

Software & AI Investor @ Z47 | Matrix Partners

Startup CTOs, OpenAI engineers, and the Z47 + DeVC team came together this week for a hands-on technical workshop. Wulfie, Thomas, Nikunj and the OpenAI solutions team spent the morning deep-diving into implementation patterns and debugging challenges across Agent Builder, the Realtime API, and GPT-5.

Ashwin Kannan Pandian

Software & AI Investor @ Z47 | Matrix Partners

I had a blast bringing this together with the OpenAI team! As India’s AI story gains momentum, we hosted a hands-on CTO Workshop in collaboration with OpenAI. The working session brought together over 90 tech leaders for a dive deep into implementation patterns and production challenges guided by Thomas Jeng, Nikunj Handa, and Wulfie Bain from the OpenAI team.

Ashwin Kannan Pandian

Software & AI Investor @ Z47 | Matrix Partners

Anthropic hosted their first Dev Day in Bangalore this week and announced a physical presence in the city. We're now one of their most important geographies. The entire day was builder-led and builder-focused — with Dario Amodei (CEO), Rahul Patil (CTO), and Irina Ghose (India head) on stage, sharing what the year's focus is and how builders in India can build on top of that.

Sudipto Sannigrahi

Managing Director at Z47

In my 10+ years as an investor, I have had the privilege of meeting some of the boldest founders who have shifted India’s trajectory for the better across manufacturing, deeptech, AI and consumer. As these startups meet global investors who share their vision, I am proud to introduce the first set of companies at ZAlpha 2026.

Ashwin Kannan Pandian

Software & AI Investor @ Z47 | Matrix Partners

I’ve had the privilege of working with some of the most talented AI founders in the ecosystem. With ZAlpha around the corner, I’m excited to introduce our portfolio companies that are building some of today’s most sought-after AI products.

Ashwin Kannan Pandian

Software & AI Investor @ Z47 | Matrix Partners

Three years ago, being bullish on AI infrastructure for India felt… a little contrarian. Now it feels obvious. Neysa has quietly become one of the backbones of India’s AI ecosystem, and we’ve been lucky to be on the journey as early investors. It’s been genuinely fun to watch how much the ecosystem has leveled up in ~3 years and to see the role Neysa has played in enabling that shift.

Vikram Vaidyanathan

Investor, Managing Director at Z47

On 18th Feb, I’ll be speaking at the NDTV Ind.ai Summit (with Startup Policy Forum) on “Investing in an AI-led era” alongside Ashutosh Sharma, Aakrit Vaish, Manav Garg and Harshjit Sethi. A timely theme as capital, compute, policy and product innovation begin to align around India’s AI moment.

Ashwin Kannan Pandian

Software & AI Investor @ Z47 | Matrix Partners

Wrapped up the AI Impact Summit with a small breakfast with founders + the OpenAI team. Marc Manara and Thomas Jeng gave us some dope on releases and improvements we can expect this year. We heard from a lot of founders that you'd like more technical workshops/ office hour style sessions to happen. Thomas and I will experiment with a few of these sessions in Bangalore soon.

Ashwin Kannan Pandian

Software & AI Investor @ Z47 | Matrix Partners

Next week, we’re hosting a technical office hours with OpenAI’s engg + solutions team This has been a recurring ask from builders across the last few events Thomas, Rahul and I have hosted.. so we figured we’d run the first session in Bangalore Pls sign up if you’re building with OAI and have a bottleneck, or just want best practices. We’ll work through things like agents + tool calling, model selection/tradeoffs, RAG, evals & monitoring, reliability and latency optimization. P.S. For those who DM’d on my last post, if you shared your email, then this should already be on your calendar Z47 Rahul Mathur Vikram Vaidyanathan | Arjun Sun

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