PE-Backed Firms Drive India's Global Capability Centre Expansion

India's Global Capability Centre (GCC) landscape is shifting, with private equity-backed and mid-market firms now driving significant expansion. These companies are leveraging GCCs beyond cost savings to build advanced capabilities in AI and engineering, creating substantial value for their portfolios. This trend signifies a maturing strategy for PE firms, moving GCCs from experimental to standard value-creation tools, with technology and financial services sectors leading the charge.

Private equity-backed firms and mid-market companies now account for a growing share of India's global capability centre (GCC) expansion, in a market historically dominated by large multinational corporations.

India has more than 500 GCCs owned or acquired by PE-backed companies, with nearly 31% of new GCC additions between FY21 and FY26 coming from this segment, industry experts and GCC enablers told ET. These companies are using GCCs beyond cost arbitrage to build artificial intelligence, engineering and product capabilities. For investors, this helps create value for portfolio companies.

“PE-backed GCCs have moved past the experimental stage and are increasingly becoming a standard lever in PE value-creation programmes,” said Amita Goyal, managing partner at consulting firm Zinnov. “On the efficiency side, GCCs help drive operating leverage through talent cost advantages and scalable capabilities. On the growth side, they accelerate product development, AI adoption, platform modernisation, cybersecurity and innovation.”

Many of the mid-market companies setting up GCCs are also backed by private equity firms. According to ANSR, a GCC enabler, nearly 65% of the more than 220 mid-market firms that have established GCCs in India since 2021 have been PE-backed.

“This (setting up GCCs) is no longer a set of isolated company-level decisions,” said Sundeep Sharma, CEO of Summit, an ANSR company that helps PE-backed organisations set up GCCs. “PE sponsors and portfolio companies are increasingly looking at GCCs as a repeatable lever to drive efficiency, technology transformation, talent access and enterprise value creation.”

PE-backed GCCs typically start with focused mandates and lean teams of “20-25 employees in the first year, before reaching an average headcount of about 70”, Sharma said. The centres are increasingly being used to centralise shared services and build centres of excellence around AI and emerging technologies.

The strongest adoption of this model is coming from technology-led sectors. Software-as-a-service, cloud and information technology security account for 55% of PE-backed mid-market GCCs, followed by banking, financial services and insurance at 15%, according to ANSR. Many of these centres are being established with ownership of product engineering, cybersecurity, platform development and AI initiatives from inception rather than traditional support functions.

Industry experts said the rise of GCC-as-a-service and build-operate-transfer models has lowered the barriers to entry for smaller firms that may not have had the scale, capital or expertise to establish offshore centres independently.

“Companies no longer need to build a GCC entirely on their own from day one,” said ANSR cofounder Vikram Ahuja. “Purpose-built GCC models have reduced execution risk and accelerated speed to value, making the model accessible to a much broader set of companies.”

“Fortune 500 companies will continue to expand their India centres, but the next phase of GCC growth will increasingly be driven by first-time adopters, PE-backed companies and mid-market enterprises,” Goyal said. “The first GCC wave was built on scale. The next wave will be driven by speed, focus and capability ownership.”

Analysts, however, caution against viewing GCCs as a one-size-fits-all playbook.

“Globalisation is a top priority for private equity firms, but whether that takes the form of a GCC or a third-party model is a very objective decision,” said Akshat Vaid, partner at research and consulting firm Everest Group. “It depends on factors such as the scale of operations, the uniqueness of the work, intellectual property requirements, existing vendor relationships and long-term business goals.”

Vaid said the GCC model has matured and is here to stay, but warned that not every centre established during the current boom will succeed. “It was easy to set up many of these GCCs. Sustaining them and continuously creating value is a different challenge,” he said.

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