51 AVGC-XR Startups Showcase AI at India AI Impact Summit

India's creative tech startups take centre stage

From February 16 to 20, 2026, Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi became the meeting ground for India's most ambitious AVGC-XR and media technology innovators. Fifty-one startups from these sectors presented their technologies at the WAVES Creators Corner, a dedicated showcase within the India AI Impact Expo 2026 — one of the most significant gatherings at the intersection of artificial intelligence and creative industries in the region's recent history.

The participation of these startups was facilitated by WaveX, the dedicated accelerator platform operating under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. WaveX has been instrumental in identifying, mentoring, and connecting early-stage creative tech ventures with policy frameworks, investors, and industry partners — and the India AI Impact Expo provided its most visible platform to date.

From newsrooms to multilingual dubbing

The demonstrations at the WAVES Creators Corner were as diverse as they were technically impressive. One of the most striking showcases was a "Zero-Touch Autonomous Newsroom" — a system capable of converting live news feeds into fully produced, multilingual news bulletins without human editorial intervention. The demonstration highlighted how far AI-driven media automation has advanced, and raised important questions about the future of broadcast journalism at scale.

Equally compelling was the "Bhasha-Wall" — a real-time lip-synced dubbing system capable of translating and synchronising audio-visual content across eight Indian languages simultaneously. For a country with 22 official languages and hundreds of regional dialects, the implications of such technology for content distribution, education, and cultural inclusion are profound. If scaled effectively, tools like the Bhasha-Wall could unlock a genuinely multilingual content economy that current infrastructure only partially serves.

AI as the creative industry's backbone

Beyond individual demonstrations, the expo as a whole reflected a broader shift in how India's AVGC sector thinks about artificial intelligence. Rather than viewing AI as a threat to creative employment, many of the startups at the showcase presented it as an enabling infrastructure — a set of tools that amplifies creative output, reduces repetitive work, and opens new distribution channels.

This perspective aligns with international trends. Global animation and VFX studios are increasingly deploying AI for tasks such as in-betweening, rigging, background generation, and voice synthesis — freeing their human artists to focus on the higher-order creative decisions that machines cannot replicate. India's startups appear to be building precisely the tools that will power this transition, both for domestic studios and global clients.

The WaveX effect and startup momentum

The visible quality and diversity of the 51 startups at the expo reflects the maturation of India's AVGC startup ecosystem. The presence of WaveX as a structured accelerator has played a meaningful role in this maturation — providing not just funding connections but also regulatory navigation, market access support, and the kind of platform visibility that the India AI Impact Expo represents. As India positions itself to capture a larger share of the global AVGC-XR market, the pipeline of innovative startups emerging from programmes like WaveX will be central to that ambition.