Startups tend to be characterised by young founders, a young workforce and marquee investors. However, in the happening AI world, a few Indian startups are deviating from these conventions. These ventures are spearheaded by seasoned industry veterans who have the vision, connections, and ambition required to create significant innovations. And they have deep pockets to bootstrap and run their ventures. Their formal careers might be well behind them but their passion to dream big remains.
Rajesh Janey, with almost four decades of experience across EMC, Dell, NetApp, and Compaq-HP, along with three other industry veterans has founded AI startup

CoreOps.AI

, to offer AI solutions to enterprises. Another tech industry old hand, CP Gurnani, who was CEO of Tech Mahindra for 18 years and has been in the IT industry for over three decades, has partnered with Rahul Bhatia led InterGlobe (parent company of Indigo) for his AI venture.

AIonOS

, the joint venture between Assago (Gurnani’s family office) and InterGlobe, founded in 2024, aims to transform businesses by integrating

genAI technologies

.
“Throughout my career I have witnessed technology’s transformative power in shaping industries and societies. With AIonOS, we are leading AI advancement for business optimisation in travel, transport, logistics, hospitality (TTLH) and other industry segments,” says Gurnani. He retired from Tech Mahindra in 2023. AIonOS is based out of Gurgaon in the National Capital Region (

NCR

).
The venture has deep domain expertise in TTLH, and is leveraging technologies including agentic AI and domain language models (DLM), as also developing AI tools and accelerators for its clients. Gurnani says he’s using emerging technologies to reimagine how businesses deliver results. The 250-people startup recently partnered with Indonesia-based telecom company Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison (IOH); the collaboration will use AIonOS’ technology and Indosat’s local expertise to develop AI solutions for Indonesia’s digital economy and enhance its competitiveness.

Banking on enterprise experience
Noida-based CoreOps.AI has a 60-people strong workforce drawn from marquee Indian and global companies including Infosys, Wipro, Accenture, Microsoft and others, to offer AI services to enterprises. “Our strength is B2B. We have a rich experience of leading technology businesses across over 100 countries at Fortune 100 majors,” says Janey, who is the chief revenue officer at CoreOps.AI.
Rajiv Srivastava, Ankur Sharma and Rajnish Gupta are the other co-founders of CoreOps.AI. Srivastava, who is CEO of the venture, was earlier global CEO of Redington, CEO of Indian Energy Exchange, MD of HP India, and COO at HP Asia Pacific & Japan (Singapore). Sharma, who is CTO, had stints with Mode Mobile and Intel in the US and was also founder & CEO of TaxSpanner, a startup which was acquired by the fintech Zaggle.
Gupta, who is COO, was previously head of India at Zebra Technologies, and head of sales at HP India.
Janey says all four founders know the industry pain points, they understand tech nology and they have the ecosystem connects. “We have worked with multinationals, helped them scale up, but we didn’t build something for India. This venture is for that,” he says.
CoreOps.AI is working on multiple areas. For instance, for a manufacturing customer it is accelerating their customer relationship management (CRM) using AI. For a German company, it is improving IT and sales processes. For another manufacturer, the startup is building a conversational AI platform.
“Our agentic AI approach cuts modernisation time by 50% and costs by 25%,” Janey says. The startup has six orders under execution, over 25 in the pipeline, and technology partnerships with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Nvidia, SAP, Salesforce and others.
With the depth of experience that such veteran led startups have, their ability to scale quickly is a clear edge they have over conventional startup ventures. Having seen multiple tech disruptions and shifts over the last three decades, including internet, cloud, mobile and more, veterans may have an edge in the current disruptive phase led by AI.