Adalat AI: Justice at Scale

The case follows Utkarsh Saxena and Arghya Bhattacharya, cofounders of Adalat AI, as they build and scale an AI-enabled system designed to address judicial backlogs in India’s courts. Operating in a developing economy with constrained public budgets, uneven digital infrastructure, and evolving regulatory norms, Adalat AI partners with high courts to automate transcription and improve case flow. As adoption expands, the founders confront strategic choices about organizational form and growth: whether to remain a nonprofit aligned closely with government institutions, pursue a for-profit or hybrid structure to access growth capital, or spin out commercial applications such as analytics and licensing. The case examines tradeoffs between mission alignment and financial sustainability, the challenges of scaling AI in public-sector environments, and the broader question of how entrepreneurs can build durable ventures within developing entrepreneurial ecosystems.