AI-native professional services, localised

The localised version of the last thesis is a different business, not a smaller one. India's professional services market for small businesses is enormous, fragmented, and runs almost entirely through a network of local CAs, company secretaries, and compliance agents most people have never heard of outside their own city.

Global mid-market buyers self-serve. Most Indian MSMEs don't, and won't, no matter how good the interface is. They pay for a relationship they trust, usually a CA who's filed their returns for a decade, not a dashboard. Any AI-native firm here has to keep that trust layer, even while replacing the manual work behind it.

The actual opportunity is the gap underneath the trusted relationship. GST filings, MCA compliance, labour law paperwork are rule-based, repetitive, and exactly the kind of work AI does well. AI doing the compliance work, a local human doing the sign-off and the relationship, is the right shape here, not a pure self-serve product.

Most small businesses in India don't avoid compliance because they don't understand it. They avoid it because a CA relationship is expensive and slow relative to what a tiny business can pay. A firm that cuts that cost by five to ten times doesn't just take share from existing CAs, it brings in businesses that were informal by default.

I'm looking for founders who've actually sat inside this ecosystem, who understand why a local agent is trusted and a SaaS login isn't, and are rebuilding the economics around AI without assuming the buyer behaves like a global self-serve customer. Same lane as AI for Indians, applied to compliance instead of consumer products.