Private Equity Pushes India GCCs From Cost Centers Into AI Buildouts

PE-Backed Companies Expand India Capability Centers

Private equity-backed and mid-market companies are taking a larger role in India’s global capability centre expansion, shifting the model beyond the large multinational corporations that historically dominated the market.

India has more than 500 PE-backed global capability centres, including centres owned outright or picked up through acquisitions.

Industry experts and GCC enablers said this segment accounted for nearly 31% of new GCC additions between FY21 and FY26.

The work is also changing.

These centres are being used for artificial intelligence, engineering and product capabilities, not only lower-cost support work.

AI And Product Ownership Move Offshore

Zinnov managing partner Amita Goyal said PE-backed GCCs have moved beyond experiments and are becoming a standard lever in value-creation programmes.

She said the centres help with operating leverage, product development, AI adoption, platform modernisation, cybersecurity and innovation.

ANSR said almost 65% of more than 220 mid-market firms that have set up GCCs in India since 2021 were PE-backed.

Sundeep Sharma of Summit, an ANSR company, said sponsors and portfolio companies are treating GCCs as a repeatable way to drive efficiency, technology transformation, talent access and enterprise value creation.

Sharma described the operating pattern as small at launch: teams can begin with 20-25 people in the first year and later reach an average size of about 70 employees.

Technology Sectors Lead The Model

ANSR put 55% of PE-backed mid-market GCCs in three technology buckets: software-as-a-service, cloud and information technology security.

Banking, financial services and insurance made up 15%.

Many centres are being launched with product engineering, cybersecurity, platform work and AI programmes built into the initial mandate.

That gives private equity firms a way to move technical work inside portfolio-company structures rather than relying only on external vendors.

Build-operate-transfer and GCC-as-a-service models have also lowered entry barriers for companies that may not have had the scale or capital to build offshore centres independently.

That matters for mid-market technology companies because the model can start with a narrower mandate and then widen into platform, security or product ownership.

The risk is that a centre opened for speed can become another coordination layer if leadership does not protect the work that needs intellectual property control or deep product context.

Sustaining The Centers Is The Harder Test

Everest Group partner Akshat Vaid warned that a GCC is not the right answer for every company.

He said the choice depends on scale, the uniqueness of the work, intellectual property requirements, vendor relationships and long-term business goals.

Vaid said the model has matured, but not every centre created during the boom will succeed.

For PE-backed and mid-market firms, the unresolved burden is whether these India centres can keep producing product, AI and cybersecurity value after the initial setup phase.