Bengaluru Moves Ahead of 2024 Benchmarks in Innovation Review

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Bengaluru strengthened its position as India’s most advanced innovation hub as Karnataka set out an aggressive plan to scale its technology economy, according to the Bengaluru Innovation Report 2025.

The document, released on Wednesday at the ongoing Bengaluru Tech Summit 2025, showed the state widening its lead in talent, women-led entrepreneurship and global capability centers, while drawing clear lines of comparison with last year’s findings on maturity and scale.

The most ambitious shift is in the government’s bet on global capability centers (GCC). The new GCC policy aims to attract 500 additional centers to bring the total to 1,000 by 2029, creating 350,000 jobs and generating about $50 billion in economic output.

The report presented the policy as the next phase of a now familiar trend, reflecting how far Bengaluru has pulled ahead in the national race to build advanced engineering and product development capabilities for global firms.

Last year’s edition had described the city as the “GCC Capital of the World,” noting that 54% of centers were operating at the stage where innovation is an active, structured practice, while 22% had moved to repeatable processes and 12% had established innovation as a defining organizational culture.

That maturity has not shifted dramatically in one year, but the 2025 document reinforced Bengaluru’s lead by pointing to rising expectations from global firms now using the city for higher-value work, from R&D to design.

Women-Led Innovation Gains Strength

Women-led innovation is another area where the 2025 report marked a visible step up. The state highlighted more than 75,000 women onboarded through Women@Work and associated skilling programs that began in 2022 with the aim of creating half a million jobs for women by 2026.

It also recorded a stronger pipeline of women-founded startups, with 42% of the 101 ventures selected under the state startup accelerator ELEVATE 2024 program led by women.

The report noted that Karnataka sent its first all-women delegation to VivaTech Paris this year under the Global Innovation Alliance track, signaling a push to improve visibility for founders outside India.

Those gains build on the base laid out in the 2024 edition, which showed Bengaluru leading the country with about 1,100 active women-led startups and $9.2 billion raised by such companies since 2010, the highest in India.

The city had already been nearly level with Delhi-NCR in the number of funded women-led startups and comfortably ahead of Mumbai. The new report framed 2025 as the point where policy intervention and maturing startup networks are beginning to converge, particularly in sectors such as biotech, cleantech, healthtech, cybersecurity and aerospace.

Talent Keeps Bengaluru Ahead

Talent remains Bengaluru’s firmest advantage. Karnataka, which has India’s largest technology workforce, now holds more than half the country’s AI and machine learning talent pool, according to the report prepared by Startup Karnataka and 3one4 Capital.

In a city of 13 million people, about 2.5 million work in the software industry. About 20% of Bengaluru’s population is employed in software, and the share rises to 25-27% when startup workers are included, the report said, citing early-stage venture fund 3one4 Capital founding partner Siddarth Pai.

These figures extend the pattern described in last year’s edition. In 2024, Bengaluru accounted for roughly a quarter of India’s digital talent, far ahead of Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Pune and Chennai. 

Karnataka contributed $65 billion in IT services exports in FY22, or 38% of the national total, and hosted over 400 R&D centers and more than 100 chip design houses. The 2024 report also pointed out that the city produced nearly 70% of India’s chip designers, a position reinforced by chip expansion plans from companies such as AMD.

The 2025 edition drew these threads together to present a sharper picture of a city whose innovation capacity is deepening on multiple fronts. The contrast with last year is not framed as a sudden jump but as a compounding effect of policies introduced over several years. 

Karnataka’s bet, the report suggested, is that these layers will sustain momentum as global firms shift more research and product responsibilities into India.