Maruti Suzuki India Limited is deepening its bet on startups and artificial intelligence, selecting five young companies for the fifth cohort of the Maruti Suzuki Incubation Programme (MSIP) to tackle operational and customer-facing challenges across its business. The new batch will work on solutions ranging from sustainable battery recycling to AI-led procurement, multilingual customer engagement, brand visibility, and software development.
Under this cohort, Maruti Suzuki India Limited has onboarded MiniMines, Easework AI, Sarvam AI, Siftly, and CodeMate AI. By engaging with these early-stage ventures, the automaker aims to co-develop practical tools that sharpen customer experience and streamline internal processes at scale.
MSIP is run in partnership with NSRCEL, the Nadathur S. Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning at IIM Bangalore. NSRCEL is responsible for scouting and shortlisting startups, mentoring founders, and connecting them to IIM Bangalore’s academic resources and entrepreneurial community. The collaboration is designed to give startups institutional backing while helping Maruti Suzuki experiment with new technologies in a controlled, outcome-focused environment.
Each of the five startups has been assigned a specific use case within Maruti Suzuki’s operations. MiniMines will focus on environmentally responsible recycling of end-of-life lithium-ion batteries and recovering valuable materials from them. As electric mobility scales, this work is intended to strengthen circularity around battery use and reduce waste.
Easework AI will concentrate on automating procurement workflows for indirect consumables by using agentic AI. Its mandate is to cut manual intervention, reduce errors, and drive efficiency in back-end purchasing activities, an area that traditionally depends heavily on paperwork and human follow-up.
Sarvam AI, one of India’s prominent AI companies with a focus on Indian languages, will deploy multilingual generative AI agents to improve customer interactions across multiple touchpoints. By handling local languages and nuanced queries, these agents are expected to support more natural conversations and consistent service experiences.
Siftly will apply generative AI to strengthen Maruti Suzuki’s brand visibility. Its tools are aimed at content generation and intelligent campaign support to help the automaker maintain sharper digital presence and more targeted communication. CodeMate AI, meanwhile, will work on using AI to accelerate development of software applications that support Maruti Suzuki’s internal business processes, helping teams prototype and ship tools faster.
Commenting on the tie-up, Hisashi Takeuchi, Managing Director and CEO of Maruti Suzuki India Limited, underlined the company’s long-running focus on startup partnerships as a way to address practical issues. “At Maruti Suzuki, we have been actively working with startups to co-create innovative and practical solutions to address real business challenges. We are delighted to collaborate with five more startups. One of these startups, MiniMines, will support us in safely recycling end-of-life batteries, while the other four startups will help improve customer engagement and drive efficiency across our business operations,” he said.
The Maruti Suzuki Incubation Programme sits within a broader portfolio of startup engagement platforms that the company has rolled out over the past seven years. Across these initiatives, Maruti Suzuki said it has screened roughly 7,400 startups, worked closely with more than 250, and formally onboarded 38 as long-term business partners.
On the growth-stage side, the company runs the Maruti Suzuki Accelerator, launched in January 2019, focused on scaling more mature startups that can quickly plug into its value chain. The Incubation Programme, started in August 2020, is positioned for early-stage teams that need deeper guidance and co-creation support.
For later-stage innovators, Maruti Suzuki introduced the Mobility Challenge in June 2021, aimed at mature startups building solutions across mobility and automotive adjacencies. To nurture even earlier ideas, it launched Nurture in 2023, in collaboration with IIM Calcutta Innovation Park, targeting idea-stage founders who are still validating concepts and prototypes.
The company has also developed FundRays, announced in September 2025 with ISB Hyderabad, to help Maruti Suzuki Innovation alumni startups become investment-ready. Through this initiative, founders receive structured support on fundraising strategies, investor outreach, and business planning so they can attract external capital beyond their initial corporate partnership.
Collectively, these programmes show how Maruti Suzuki is positioning itself as both an automaker and a systematic startup partner. By combining domain expertise, scale, and structured platforms with entrepreneurial talent, the company is seeking to address emerging issues such as sustainable battery management, AI-enabled customer service, and digitised operations. The latest MSIP cohort underscores that strategy, giving five AI-driven startups an opportunity to build, test, and potentially deploy solutions across one of India’s largest automotive businesses.
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