QwikBuild Raises $2.3M Pre-Seed Led by Japan's Globalway
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QwikBuild, a Bengaluru-based enterprise AI startup, has raised $2.3 million, or about ₹22 crore, in a pre-seed round led by the Japanese tech company Globalway.
Blume Ventures, DeVC and Marsshot also joined the round. So did two angel investors: Lalit Keshre, the founder of Groww, and Ankit Nagori, the CEO of Curefoods.
Most of the money will go into go-to-market work. QwikBuild plans to set up a team in the US and to widen its operations across Southeast Asia.
The company also said it is forming a joint venture with Globalway to enter Japan's enterprise software market. The venture is expected to start operating by the end of 2026. It will offer QwikBuild's platform to Globalway's current and prospective enterprise customers in Japan.
What the platform does
Pradeep Ayyagari, a former executive at slice, founded QwikBuild in 2025. The company builds enterprise software and AI agents meant to cut the time it takes to develop and deploy software. It combines custom software development with AI-driven workflow automation.
Businesses can build applications from scratch, replace legacy systems, or add custom layers on top of tools from large vendors such as SAP and Salesforce.
QwikBuild says it serves more than 100 enterprises in India, Southeast Asia, the US and Dubai. According to the company, about 10-12% of its clients are large enterprises. Around 30% are smaller businesses that use the platform to deploy software without setting up dedicated technology teams.
Ayyagari says the product focuses on codifying business decisions, not only on automating single tasks. His example is a financial services firm that must decide which customers to call, what filters to apply and which scripts to use for each segment. A specialised AI startup might automate the calling itself. QwikBuild would codify the decisions that determine which calls get made. Companies can then run voice agents or other tools to carry out those workflows, through QwikBuild or through other providers.
"Tech has always been the enabler. But adoption of tech was always the hardest problem that I have seen," said Ayyagari, who has worked at Flipkart, Swiggy and slice. QwikBuild aims to let business teams build and test applications as their requirements change, without repeatedly relying on engineering teams. Ayyagari described a recent customer meeting where a business team discussed changes to an application. "The agent understood what the context was. The feature was immediately built within the next five minutes," he said. "Tech and business can work parallelly together," he added.
He also put the market opportunity in numbers. "Hardly 1% of enterprises have adopted AI. It's a huge market that needs to be unlocked," he said. By his estimate, the software needed to automate businesses over the next five years would cost "at least 10X" what is available today.
Investor mood around enterprise AI
Another enterprise AI and automation startup, RapidCanvas, raised $29 million last week. Indian AI startup funding rose 265% year on year to $438 million in the third quarter of 2026, according to a funding report by Inc42.
The same publication surveyed more than 85 institutional investors. Of those, 63% saw some froth in AI valuations, and about half expected a correction within 18 months. Investors named vertical AI as the biggest value driver over the next five years, ahead of AI hardware and semiconductors and AI-led IT and business services.
Source: Inc42