First startups, now VCs: AI is rewriting the traditional investment playbook

Until a few months ago, Anushka* ran the kind of war room that still defines much of India’s software workforce—ten engineers juggling regression suites, Jira tickets, and edge-case bug hunts on Slack, and scheduling daily standups in between meals. As the senior QA lead at a mid-sized Bengaluru fintech, her team was the last line of defence between broken code and a broken product.

Then one morning, the war room simply vanished.

The startup had decided it no longer needed human testers in the driving seat, instead placing trust in a homegrown AI pipeline trained on thousands of historical test cases. It churned out automated test reports, spotted regressions, flagged anomalies, and even triggered rollback commands—all without human intervention. The team’s strength halved, and Anushka’s job was reduced to skimming auto-generated summaries, correcting the occasional false positive, and hitting “approve.”