Baring Private Equity Asia-backed Virtusa is increasing its focus on India as global companies expand their India-based captive units and accelerate artificial intelligence adoption, its CEO Nitesh Banga said, citing opportunities across global capability centres (GCCs), tier-2 cities and semiconductor engineering.
“India is our largest delivery footprint globally. In fact, by far it is the biggest. Almost all of our clients we service out of India,” Nitesh Banga said in an interview with BW Businessworld during his India visit.
Banga said India is no longer just a delivery hub, with key decisions increasingly shifting to the country. “Over the last few years, we are also seeing significant amount of traction happen with the GCC ecosystem of our clients in India, where a lot of the decision making is moving. A lot of strategic, transformational and mission critical programmes are being executed here,” he said.
As per industry reports, the GCC space in India is projected to reach USD 105 billion by 2030, supported by nearly 2,400 centres employing over 2.8 million professionals, up from the current 1,700 centres
Banga added that many GCCs have reached scale but are struggling to deliver outcomes. “There will be thousands of GCCs, but many of them have reached a stage where there are like a few hundreds of people, but they’re not able to generate the kind of transformational outcome that the parent organisation expected of that,” Banga said.
Tier-2 Cities And Talent Expansion
Virtusa is also expanding its footprint beyond major technology hubs in India. In 2025, the company acquired Bengaluru-based semiconductor engineering firm SmartSoC, which has operations in Hubli.
“Hubli is very interesting for us, we want to continue to expand some of these centres,” CEO Banga said. “Hopefully we get a foothold into one of the fast-growing tier-2 cities and that will become a strategy for us going forward to continue to expand our talent footprint.”
He said tier-2 locations help improve retention and broaden access to talent. “It actually helps us to improve retention. It also helps us in terms of foster talent expansion to support our clients.”
Semiconductor Engineering Push
The SmartSoC acquisition is part of Virtusa’s strategy to expand its engineering services across the technology stack, from hardware to software.
“We want to go all the way from chip to network to cloud to app,” Banga said. “This will actually firmly position us to move from a software AI world to also an edge AI world.”
He said the semiconductor engineering market is expanding rapidly. “We can easily target something like between 50-100 per cent CAGR. Because I feel like there is so much work to do.”
Banga also pointed to opportunities tied to India’s manufacturing push. “There are a lot of turnkey engagements, especially in India with the whole ‘Make In India’ set up that is going on, especially with the latest semiconductor laws that are being passed.”
M&A strategy
Virtusa has completed four acquisitions in the past 12 months, including SmartSoC and telecom network firm Sincera.
“We don’t want to actually do very large acquisitions,” Banga said. “I believe in the concept of string of pearls as opposed to big bang acquisitions because it distracts the company.”
He added that acquisitions must be material but manageable. “We don’t want to do very, very large acquisitions because that takes away our leadership bandwidth and strategic progress.”
India headcount grew by about 15 per cent over the past year after SmartSoC acquisition, he said. “That is on the back of actually our customers believing in us more, giving us more mission critical work packets.”
Looking ahead, Banga said India would remain central to Virtusa’s growth. “India market continues to be very exciting for us, both as a market and as a delivery perspective,” he said.
AI-led Revenue Growth
Artificial intelligence is now embedded across Virtusa’s offerings, with the company tracking AI-driven revenues separately.
“Together today that revenue for us is between 17-18 per cent of our total revenue,” Banga said. “It was actually about a year back that that was almost 3 per cent.”
He said Virtusa is also using AI to drive productivity internally. “We are seeing almost 60-70 per cent improvement from a productivity perspective,” he said, citing gains in digital assurance and software development lifecycles. |
