India’s Shift from Services to Deep-Tech

By Roshan Kumar Sahu, Co-Founder-FaceOff Technologies Inc.

For decades, India’s IT success story was defined by its services industry. Companies like Infosys, TCS, and Wipro built global reputations by delivering outsourcing and consulting solutions to Fortune 500 clients.

Infosys, TCS, Wipro, and HCL thrived on offshore IT services and consulting, scaling human capital for predictable growth. This low-risk model fostered execution over innovation. Notable products like Infosys’s Finacle and TCS’s BaNCS are exceptions, with limited product success compared to their dominant services-driven revenues.

Their approach was low-risk but highly scalable. By leveraging India’s vast pool of engineering talent, they created a delivery engine that became the backbone of enterprise IT across the world.

This model offered predictable revenue streams and cemented India’s role as the “back office of the world.” However, it also created a culture where efficiency, compliance, and execution mattered more than experimentation.

As a result, innovation in products was limited. Infosys’s Finacle banking software became a rare exception, but such bold bets were the outliers, not the norm. Most firms avoided the risks of long development cycles and uncertain adoption.

In contrast, a new breed of Indian companies began charting a different path. Zoho and Freshworks pioneered a product-first approach, building cloud-native SaaS applications with global ambitions.

At the same time, Tally Solutions pioneered SME accounting with Tally ERP, dominating until GST and cloud rivals disrupted its lead. iSPIRT’s India Stack birthed platforms like UPI and Aadhaar, fueling mass adoption. On this foundation, Razorpay, PhonePe, and Paytm built fintech ecosystems spanning payments, gateways, insurance, and investments.

These companies showed that Indian talent could compete head-on with Silicon Valley, taking on giants like Salesforce and HubSpot while maintaining a global customer base.

Building on that foundation, a fresh wave of deep-tech innovators is now redefining India’s technology narrative. FaceOff Technologies is one such example.

FaceOff’s Adaptive Cognito Engine (ACE) is built to address some of the most urgent digital risks: deepfake detection, synthetic fraud prevention, and anti-money laundering compliance. These are challenges relevant not just in India, but worldwide.With this it is going to solve the problem of the Billions.

What makes FaceOff different is its DNA. It focuses on problem-driven innovation, creating scalable intellectual property that grows through APIs and platforms rather than headcount expansion.

This marks a turning point. India is no longer only a services powerhouse. It is emerging as a hub for deep-tech solutions that can address the most pressing challenges of the AI era.