Private equity investors love India, at least more than any other country in South Asian. Since 2015, India has been the focus of a majority of the total private equity and venture capital tech activity in the region. India accounted for 56 percent of deals by value, and 71 percent by volume of all the PE and VC activity in South and South East Asian markets, the report said. The next biggest market, Singapore, accounted for 33 percent of the deal value and 10 percent of the volume. "As investors look to enter the game early, VC funding has focused on startups," the report said.

Little is known about the young startup except that its founder and CEO, Pankaj Gupta, was the former chief technology and product officer of the now defunct Stayzilla. He also did a five-year stint at Twitter, working on personalisation and recommendation engines for the social media platform. Halli Labs will be joining Google's Next Billion Users team, which is part of its bet to expand its services to non-English speaking users from India. Such users, according to a study it co-authored with KPMG, will form nine out of the ten new internet users coming online. Google has increasingly emphasised how important AI and machine learning is to them.