Bengaluru: Companion Labs, a consumer AI company building interactive, entertainment-led experiences for India’s vernacular and culturally diverse audiences, has raised $2.5 million in seed funding led by Peak XV’s Surge, with participation from All in Capital, UntitledVC, DeVC and several angel investors.
The announcement follows Companion Labs’ participation at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi last week, where the company was featured at the summit’s flagship Impact AI PitchFest. The platform spotlighted high-potential early-stage AI startups, with Companion Labs among a select group of companies backed by Peak XV at the event—underscoring growing investor conviction in founders building AI-native products designed for India’s next wave of internet users.
Operating at the intersection of AI and entertainment, Companion Labs is creating immersive, character-driven experiences that allow users to explore alternate lives, careers and aspirations through AI-powered narratives. Rather than positioning AI primarily as a productivity tool, the company treats AI as a creative medium, enabling people to “live” parallel lives in richly contextual worlds shaped by language, culture and personal ambition.
Built ground-up for India, Companion Labs’ experiences reflect the linguistic, cultural and social nuances of Tier 2, Tier 3 and Tier 4 audiences. The company is focused on vernacular languages including Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Punjabi, Marathi and Bengali, targeting a young, aspirational and digitally native population for whom entertainment has historically driven rapid adoption of new technology. This approach aligns with a broader shift highlighted at the India AI Impact Summit, where founders and investors pointed to consumer-facing, population-scale AI products in local languages as a key driver of India’s AI opportunity.
Companion Labs was founded by Akshay Jhanwar and Ajit Pol, who bring complementary experience across consumer internet, gaming and entertainment. Ajit has previously held roles at Flipkart, Leap and in gaming, while Akshay spent over four years at Cred. Their founding insight emerged from early experimentation with global AI character platforms, which they found were largely Western in tone and context, limiting resonance with Indian users.
“India’s next wave of AI adoption will be driven by consumer experiences that feel native to our languages, cultures, and aspirations,” said Akshay Jhanwar, Co-founder, Companion Labs. “We are building AI as a new form of entertainment, where people can explore alternate paths and identities in ways that feel deeply personal and rooted in their own context.”
Ajit Pol, Co-founder, Companion Labs, added, “Entertainment has always been the gateway to mass technology adoption in India. With AI, storytelling becomes interactive and personalised at scale. Our ambition is to build category-defining consumer AI experiences from India, for India.”
The company plans to deploy the funding to accelerate product development, invest in AI capabilities and continue refining its offering as it works toward product–market fit. Over the long term, Companion Labs aims to define a new category of AI-native entertainment built specifically for India’s vernacular internet users.
