Anthropic Ropes In Ex-Microsoft Sangeeta Bavi To Helm Startups, Growth In India

Former Microsoft executive Sangeeta Bavi has joined AI startup Anthropic as head of sales, digital natives and startups in India

Bavi earlier spent nearly a decade at Microsoft, where she built the big tech company’s startups business from scratch and drove adoption of Azure OpenAI on enterprise accounts.

She will take over similar responsibilities at Anthropic, driving adoption of Claude among Indian startups and mid-market companies.

In her most recent role before joining Anthropic, she served as an advisor to deeptech VC Seafund in her previous role, before which she spent a year as Chief Operating Officer at YourStory Media. Earlier in her career, she also worked at Nokia and Wipro.

“As I got to know Anthropic, its people, its mission and its way of thinking, something clicked deeply. A place built on the conviction that AI must be safe and genuinely beneficial for humanity. Where frontier research, a growing product portfolio and a warm, deeply principled culture reinforce each other every single day,” she wrote in a LinkedIn post announcing the move.

The move comes as Anthropic has been strengthening its leadership team in India and globally. Earlier this year, ex-Microsoft India MD Irina Ghose joined the AI giant as its India MD along with leading the establishment of its regional operations. The firm also onboarded Siddiq Zaman, former Senior Director – Global Partnerships & Channels at ServiceNow, as Head of Partnerships – India.

Globally, too, Anthropic recently scored a coup by hiring Andrej Karpathy, one of the founding members of rival OpenAI and former Director of AI at Tesla.

Anthropic has been doubling down on expanding its presence in India at a time when the country’s market has emerged as one of its fastest-growing markets, accounting for 7.2% of global Claude usage, second only to the US at 21.6%.

Anthropic’s India push also reflects a broader shift underway in the country’s enterprise AI adoption cycle. Over the past two years, Indian companies across banking, insurance, IT services and consumer sectors have moved beyond AI pilots and are now deploying models in production-grade, customer-facing workflows.

Unlike rivals such as OpenAI and Google, which have gained visibility through consumer-facing AI products, Anthropic has increasingly positioned itself as an enterprise-first AI company. Industry executives believe this positioning could work well in India, where enterprises are now looking beyond access to models and focusing instead on safe deployment at scale.

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