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Adobe has acquired Indian AI startup Rilo, less than a year after it launched. The deal value hasn’t been disclosed. Rilo will shut down, while its six-member team joins Adobe.
What does it do: founded by IIT Bombay alumni Georgi Boby and Dhruv Jaglan in 2025, Rilo built an AI tool that lets users create and run workflows simply by describing what they need in plain English.
Sales and marketing teams could use it to track competitors, find prospects, analyse sales calls, or repurpose and distribute content across different tools.
The startup had raised close to $1 million from investors including Peak XV Partners, DeVC and Day Zero Ventures, and had attracted more than 10,000 users within months of its launch.
Why Adobe wants it: for Adobe, Rilo is less about one flashy new feature and more about adding AI-powered automation to its marketing tools. Its technology could help businesses automate repetitive marketing tasks, while giving Adobe a ready-made team that already knows how to build these AI workflows.
And the timing is important. Businesses are increasingly using AI agents to handle marketing tasks, while Adobe faces competition from Canva, OpenAI and Anthropic. Buying Rilo lets Adobe add these capabilities faster instead of spending years building them from scratch.
A bigger AI shopping spree: the Rilo deal also reflects a wider shift in the tech industry. Companies like Canva, Google, Amazon and Meta are all racing to bring AI into marketing, and increasingly, they’re buying smaller startups to get there faster.
It’s a playbook Adobe has used in India before.
In 2023, it acquired AI video startup Rephrase.ai. Rilo follows the same logic: find a small team solving a specific problem, buy the technology, and plug it into a much bigger ecosystem.
For Adobe, it’s a way to keep pace in the AI race. For India’s startup ecosystem, it’s another sign that global tech giants are looking to India for specialised AI talent and technology, not just cheap engineering.
