Upekkha’s VIBE 2025 concludes with VIBE Pilots, a 24-hour innovation sprint with enterprise leaders and pre-selected AI startups co-building and demoing customized pilots, designed with immediate feedback and real-world deployment in mind. 

Upekkha, the India–US accelerator behind 150+ SaaS and AI startups, successfully hosted VIBE 2025 at The Leela Palace, Bengaluru.

The event opened with a powerful keynote by Simon Wardley, who emphasized how LLMs becoming a utility has led to new practices being created.

“Enterprise leaders are struggling to square the hype and promise of AI with the high failure rate from pilot to production”, says Prasanna Krishnamoorthy, Managing Partner, Upekkha.

 “In the AI era, leaders must ground decisions in where agency lies - with humans in the loop or with swarms of agents taking decisions”.

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Prof. Saras Sarasvathy urged attendees to embrace the uncertainty unleashed by the rapid shift in AI capabilities, as a catalyst for innovation and highlighted the need for co-creation between enterprise leaders and entrepreneurs to create new markets that drive economic and societal progress. 

“When AI changes happen so rapidly, it’s all the more important for us to learn how to be patient and resilient, to prepare for a marathon of changes where each change may lead to even more uncertainty.”

 

While VIBE Coding makes development 10X faster, VIBE Pilots reduces months of slow Proof of Concept back and forth to 24 hours of high intensity engagement between business leaders and startup founders. The high energy in person fine tuning sessions create sparks between the enterprise and startup, potentially leading to new business opportunities between them.

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A highlight of the summit was the launch of the VIBE50 Vertical AI Report 2025, spotlighting 50 Indian startups embedding AI into core industry workflows across finance, healthcare, manufacturing, logistics, retail, and energy.

Thiyagarajan Maruthavanan, also Managing Partner at Upekkha, added, “Every vertical will have its own 'Claude' moment—sudden, exponential growth triggered by AI + human synergy. When that happens, it's winner-takes-all, and we believe many of these vertical AI startups will lead the way.”