BENGALURU (Diya TV) — For the better part of the past 20 years, chiefs of the world’s largest tech companies have turned their heads to India as a low-cost destination to fuel their back-office software projects. It wasn’t until recently that the trend began to reverse.

Later this week, top executives from companies such as Toyota, Colgate-Palmolive and telecom giant Bharti Airtel will visit Bengaluru to be pitched by domestic tech software startups Aujas, Canvazify and FarEye. The two-day event, dubbed In-Tech50, will feature more than a dozen entrepreneurs who will be seeking investments or to sign partnership agreements with the aforementioned companies, as well as a laundry list of others.

After years of outsourcing software development and maintenance to India’s $160 billion IT industry, customers are now leveraging the country’s services for the opposite purpose — India has emerged as a commodity in the tech community, no longer just as a service region, said Piyush Singh.

“India is no longer seen as just a services economy,” Singh, the former chief information officer of Great American Insurance Co., said. “A lot of these large Fortune 500 companies have moved beyond leveraging India for IT sourcing and moved on to leveraging top technology talent from countries like India.”

The top three startups at the conclusion of the event will also receive an invitation to join an accelerator program in Silicon Valley, courtesy of Plug and Play. The program will also introduce the winners to potential investors in the U.S.

“The top three startups — in terms of the relevance of their products to the US market — will get funded by Plug and Play. After that these startups will get exposure to 30-40 potential funders in the US — so as you can see, these startups will get huge exposure to take their ideas to the next level,” Singh said.

However, Singh revealed that the introduction of e-commerce companies to India’s economy over the past five years has taken away from the country’s software product ecosystem.

“Ecommerce has sucked away a lot of funding that otherwise could have gone to these promising products startups — which is a little unfortunate. That being said, what we also see is the fact that Indian products startups are starting to get traction from new kinds of angel investors, which is a good sign,” he said.