By Neeraj Kapoor and Ananya Sharma 
Lucknow, March 24: So there is this startup. It launched less than a year ago. It has never raised a single rupee from investors. Its total yearly earnings are roughly what a decent mid-level government employee makes in a month. And last Sunday, the Chief Minister of India’s most populous state stood up and announced that this company will be receiving a Rs 25,000 crore deal to build AI parks, a full university, and an entire AI city.
India’s internet did not take a lunch break before responding.
Puch AI, a Bengaluru-based startup founded in 2025, became the most talked-about tech company in India overnight. Not because of a product launch. Not because of a funding round. But because of a number that made people do a double take: Puch AI’s annual revenue stood at just Rs 42.9 lakh as of March 31, 2025, making the Rs 25,000 crore MoU nearly 6,000 times larger than its annual earnings.
Let that sink in for a moment.
Before the Circus, There Was Actually a Product
Here is the thing most people missed in the middle of all the trolling. Puch AI is not a fake company. It is not a shell. It builds something real, and honestly, something quite clever for the Indian context.
Puch AI is built on a simple mission: everyone deserves access to AI. It positions itself as the introduction and gateway to AI for billions of people. While tech-literate users across the world have had their ChatGPT moment, widespread adoption in India is yet to happen, and Puch AI launched on WhatsApp for free as the first step toward changing that.
Think about what that means practically. When most people hear “artificial intelligence,” they picture something you access on a laptop, in English, after creating an account with your email. That describes maybe 15 to 20 crore Indians on a good day. The other 120 crore? They are on their phones, on WhatsApp, talking to family, sharing voice notes, forwarding videos in Hindi and Tamil and Bhojpuri.
WhatsApp is used by over 535 million Indians, making it the most accessible app for mass communication. Puch AI embeds itself within WhatsApp to remove the barrier of downloading or learning a new app, leveraging an already-established trust and habit to create a smoother, low-effort entry point for new users.
The platform supports 22 languages including Hindi, Marathi, and Tamil. When users call on the Puch AI number, they are greeted with an AI-generated voice modelled on Indian celebrities such as Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan, Sachin Tendulkar, Kareena Kapoor, and Diljit Dosanjh.
A grandmother in Gorakhpur who has never used Google can now send a voice note in Awadhi and get an answer back. That is genuinely new. That is genuinely useful.
But Wait, Why Does This AI Use a Phone Number?
This is a question that surprisingly few journalists have stopped to ask, and it deserves a straight answer because it reveals both the smartest and the most questionable thing about how Puch AI works.
Every major AI platform in the world operates the same way. You go to a website, you sign up with your email address, you verify your identity, and then you get access. ChatGPT does it. Google Gemini does it. Microsoft Copilot does it. The email-based login is so standard that most people do not even think about it anymore.
Puch AI is banking on the number 9090909090, which works on WhatsApp, to capture attention, draw in users, and attract investors. The company argues that India has largely depended on AI models developed overseas, and it is time for a sovereign AI system tailored to India’s languages and cultural nuances.
The logic behind skipping email is not silly. In rural India, WhatsApp numbers are far more universal than email IDs. Asking a first-time smartphone user in a small town to create a Gmail account, remember a password, verify it, and then navigate to a new website is asking them to climb a wall before they have even started. A WhatsApp number they already use every day removes that wall completely.
You simply call or message 9090909090, and when an AI picks up, sometimes in a celebrity voice, it is ready to answer your question, give explanations, help with tasks, or just chat in 22 languages.
That said, this approach raises a concern that the company has not addressed publicly and that users should think carefully about. When you interact with Puch AI through WhatsApp, your personal mobile number, the same number linked to your bank account, your Aadhaar card, your UPI app, and your family group chats, becomes your identity on that platform. You are not creating a separate account. You are handing over your most personal digital identifier to a nine-month-old startup with no published data privacy policy specific to how it handles voice conversations or chat history.
With email-based platforms, there is at least a layer of separation. Your Gmail ID is not your Aadhaar number. With Puch AI, there is no such separation. Your phone number is your login, your identity, and your data footprint all in one. For a company positioning itself as AI infrastructure for hundreds of millions of Indians, many of whom will ask personal questions about health, money, or family matters, this gap in transparency is not a small concern. It is a fundamental one.
The Rs 25,000 Crore Announcement, In Plain Language
On March 23, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath posted on X that a Rs 25,000 crore MoU with Puch AI will bring AI Parks, large-scale data centre infrastructure, AI Commons, and an AI University to Uttar Pradesh, strengthening governance and creating future-ready opportunities.
For anyone unfamiliar with what an MoU actually is: it stands for Memorandum of Understanding, and in the world of government deals, it is essentially a formal expression of interest. Two parties write down that they would like to explore working together. There is no money transferred. There is no contract signed. There is no legal obligation on either side. Think of it like a proposal at the start of an engagement, not a wedding certificate.
State governments across India sign dozens of these at investment summits every single year. A large portion of them never progress beyond the announcement. That is not a secret in policy circles, but it tends to get lost when a number like Rs 25,000 crore appears in a headline.
The plan outlines AI Parks, data centres, an AI Commons platform for citizens, a dedicated AI University, and a 40-acre plot near the Lucknow airport identified as the site for India’s first AI City. These are real goals that, if achieved, would matter enormously for UP’s youth. But achieving them requires the construction of hardware, buildings, regulatory approvals, faculty recruitment, and billions of rupees in actual capital deployment. None of that comes from an MoU signed with a company whose total annual revenue would not cover the electricity bill of a single mid-sized data centre.
The Internet Responds, And It Is Not Gentle
Within hours of the announcement, the trolling reached the kind of volume that forces even political offices to issue clarifications.
Community Notes on the Chief Minister’s own post on X stated that Puch AI is a one-year-old startup with revenue of less than Rs 50 lakh per year, with no real capability or capacity to execute an MoU of this scale, and that the founder lives on viral controversies. The note gathered over 87,600 views.
The comments section turned into a mix of genuine concern and outright comedy. People posted memes comparing the Rs 42.9 lakh revenue to the Rs 25,000 crore deal. Startup commentator Varun Choudhary wrote that a 2025-born startup with barely 10 to 30 employees being projected for a $3 billion investment is either the fastest hyper-scale story in startup history or a case that demands far more transparency. He pointed out there is no proven infrastructure experience for building data centres, AI parks, or a university.
The jokes wrote themselves, but there was real frustration underneath them too. UP is a state with serious unemployment, patchy infrastructure, and millions of young people who need actual tech jobs, not press releases.
Following this, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath reposts on X today.
The Founder’s History Did Not Help His Case
Part of why the criticism landed so hard is that Siddharth Bhatia, Puch AI’s co-founder and CEO, has built a reputation for grabbing headlines with moves that are more about attention than execution.
In August 2025, he announced a $50 billion unsolicited offer to acquire Perplexity AI and Google Chrome, despite Puch AI being valued at just $50 million at the time. Anyone wishing to participate in the deal was asked to email perplexity@puch.ai with the first person to convince Perplexity’s CEO winning an iPhone. The post went viral but was widely read as a publicity stunt rather than a serious business move.
For context, a $50 million company offering $50 billion to buy a competitor is the startup equivalent of a roadside tea seller announcing a bid to acquire the Taj Hotel chain, then offering chai to whoever helps close the deal. It is funny. It gets shared. It earns zero credibility in serious investor rooms.
The company also bought what is being called India’s most expensive phone number, 9090909090, framing it as a symbolic commitment to making AI accessible to a billion Indians. Again, a clever story. But stories and infrastructure are very different things.
When the Rs 25,000 crore MoU arrived so soon after these stunts, the startup community connected the dots quickly. The question being asked openly on X was not whether Puch AI has a good product. It was whether the company is better at generating announcements than at building things.
The Government Quietly Changes Its Tune
By the morning of March 24, the scale of the backlash directed not just at Puch AI but at CM Yogi himself forced a clarification. The Chief Minister stated that an MoU by Invest UP is a preliminary step before detailed due diligence and project evaluation, that MoUs are non-binding on the state government, and that any further progress is subject to detailed evaluation of the prospective investor’s proposal. Any prospective investor falling short of requirements will automatically have their MoU terminated.
Technically, that statement is entirely accurate. Legally, the government is covered. But it also quietly dismantles the narrative the original announcement was trying to build. If this is just a preliminary conversation, why was it announced with a Rs 25,000 crore headline figure and no caveats? Why did the Chief Minister’s social media team frame it as a milestone rather than as an exploratory discussion?
That gap between the framing of the announcement and the legal reality of what was actually signed is the real story here, and it is a pattern that repeats itself in Indian state investment policy far more often than it should.
What Actually Matters About Puch AI
Peel away the noise and there are two things worth watching genuinely.
For first-time AI users and regional audiences, Puch AI does something useful. It delivers natural conversational responses in Indian languages, requires no extra app or login, and offers image, video, and sticker generation features that are practical for everyday users. Power users will still prefer broader tools like ChatGPT or Gemini, but the platform has real strengths in accessibility and local language utility.
That is a product worth building. India needs it. The question is whether the company building it has the financial foundation and the institutional trust needed to scale it responsibly.
Puch AI’s access depends on WhatsApp infrastructure, and Meta updated its Business API in late 2025 to block third-party AI chatbots from its platform, citing user privacy and security. When MediaNama tested the Puch AI WhatsApp link, it returned no results. That is not a minor technical issue. That is a potential existential problem for a company whose entire distribution model rests on a platform it does not control, owned by a corporation with its own AI ambitions.
One Last Thing Worth Saying
The Indian AI startup space is full of builders doing genuinely important work with limited resources and no guarantee of success. Puch AI may well be one of them. The core idea, bringing AI to first-time users in their own language through the phone in their pocket, is sound and necessary.
But the Rs 25,000 crore announcement did the company no favours. It invited scrutiny the product was not ready to withstand. It handed critics a number so detached from the company’s current reality that no amount of reasonable explanation could make it look grounded. And it associated a government’s technology credibility with a startup that, fairly or unfairly, had already spent months becoming known more for stunts than for substance.
If Puch AI succeeds, the venture could mark a significant step towards establishing a homegrown AI presence in a market dominated by foreign players, while giving millions of Indians their first real taste of artificial intelligence.
That outcome is possible. But it will require the company to do something it has not yet fully demonstrated: to build quietly, deliver consistently, and let the product speak louder than the press release.
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Tech writer passionate about AI, startups, and the digital economy, blending industry insights with storytelling.
- Neeraj Kapoor
- Neeraj Kapoor
- Neeraj Kapoor
- Neeraj Kapoor
Covers Indian politics, governance, and policy developments with over a decade of experience in political reporting.
- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
Arun Upadhayay and Ananya Sharma 
Ananya Sharma