India has quietly built the most sophisticated digital public infrastructure stack in the world. Aadhaar handles 1.3 billion identity verifications. UPI processes over 13 billion transactions per month. ONDC is disaggregating e-commerce. GeM is digitising government procurement. DigiLocker holds 6 billion documents. The India Stack is genuinely world-class.
The software that sits on top of it is, with rare exceptions, terrible. Generic SaaS built in Bangalore with no deep understanding of the APIs. Legacy systems that predate the stack and haven't been replaced. Manual workarounds for digital processes that should be automated. The infrastructure layer is a 10x investment. The application layer is a 0.1x investment. The gap is the opportunity.
What the Stack Actually Enables
Most Indian enterprise software teams treat GeM as a website you go to manually. BITSS built GeM SaaS for Archana Associates — a system that programmatically monitors tenders matching their capability profile, auto-generates compliance documents, and submits bids with minimal human intervention. The GeM API makes all of this possible. Almost nobody is building on it this way.
"The competitive moat for the next generation of Indian enterprise software isn't the product features. It's depth of API integration with the India Stack. The teams that master this will be untouchable."
The Highest-Value Unbuilt Applications
- ONDC-native commerce intelligence — real-time competitive pricing and inventory analytics across the open network
- GeM automation suites — end-to-end government procurement systems for consultancies and contractors averaging ₹50Cr+ in annual tender volume
- DigiLocker enterprise connectors — automated document verification pipelines for NBFC, insurance, and HR workflows
- UPI B2B credit rails — embedded credit products using UPI transaction history as underwriting data
- DPDP compliance engines — automated data residency and consent management for enterprises navigating India's new data protection regime
The Builder's Perspective
Having built on GeM APIs directly, our experience is that the documentation is better than most private sector APIs we work with. The authentication flows are well-designed. The rate limits are generous. The problem isn't that the stack is hard to build on. The problem is that most software teams in India learned to build on Shopify and AWS before they learned to build on the India Stack.
That's changing. The next 3 years will produce a cohort of Indian software companies with deep India Stack integration as their core competency. The ones that move first will compound their advantage. We are building for that future — and we're looking for enterprise partners who want to build with us.