A growing number of Indian unicorns are spinning off AI-native platforms, seeking to turn internal tools into standalone businesses. ET takes a closer look.
“Then a business miracle happened.” That is how Jeff Bezos described the birth of Amazon Web Services. In the early 2000s, the idea of renting computing power on demand was unheard of.
AWS emerged out of necessity. Faced with soaring resource consumption, logistical complexity, and inefficient utilisation of servers, storage and networking infrastructure, Amazon reimagined computing as a service delivered over the internet; an on-demand utility, much like electricity supplied through a grid.
“At AWS we completely reinvented how companies buy computation,” Bezos said about the cloud computing breakthrough. Today, AWS is Amazon’s cash cow, generating more than $110 billion in annual revenue in 2025. CEO Andy Jassy has estimated that the annual revenue of this most profitable unit could swell to $600 billion by 2036.
Atlassian’s Jira was started as an internal bug tracking tool, before it became a multimillion revenue generating business for the firm. The gaming company Tiny Speck developed an internal communication tool Slack for real-time collaboration and file sharing. They shut the game they were developing but launched Slack as a workplace messenger platform. Five years ago Salesforce bought Slack for $27 billion.
A process innovation or a tech solution for internal usage turning into a tremendously successful business spin-off is an exciting dream for entrepreneurs. While it is too early to say the eventual scale of success, the AI wave has set the stage for a bunch of Indian consumer internet unicorns to tap into their domain expertise and proprietary data to build out new businesses.
In the past two years, companies such as NoBroker, Moglix, Apna and Practo have spun-off tech businesses that leverage AI and data they have accumulated over the years.
