Reading BRICS 2026 Like an Entrepreneur — Not a Diplomat

On 12–13 September, India hosted the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi, under the theme "Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability" — one part of a much larger agenda that, like every summit, also covered diplomatic and security ground outside the scope of this piece. It was also, quietly, an anniversary: twenty years since Brazil, Russia, India and China first grouped together in 2006. What came out of those two days was the New Delhi Declaration — 140 paragraphs covering global governance, economics, technology, health, climate and culture.

Most people will read a document like this as diplomacy. It's worth reading it, instead, the way a builder would: as a list of what twenty-one countries currently agree is worth building, funding, or fixing next. Some of it is real infrastructure you can point to today. Some of it is a proposal on a page, waiting for a budget. Telling the two apart is the actual value of this piece.

What's new, what's ongoing, and what's still just an idea

The Declaration's language is a useful tell. Most of it uses words like "reaffirm," "welcome," and "note" — the vocabulary of continuity, not of launch day. Read carefully, though, and there's a genuine three-way split in the startup section alone. The BRICS Incubator Network is new — established at this summit. The BRICS Startup Knowledge Hub and BRICS Startup Forum are older mechanisms that this summit simply strengthens. And the one truly new idea on the table — a proposed BRICS Startup Innovation Fund, meant to pool voluntary public and private capital and close financing gaps for startups at different stages — is exactly that: a proposal. No confirmed size, no confirmed funding source, no launch date. It's a direction leaders have agreed is worth pursuing, not a form you can fill out yet. Anyone telling you otherwise is reading the headline, not the paragraph.

The problem BRICS named that Tier II and Tier III founders already know

The most concrete idea in the entire entrepreneurship section has nothing to do with technology. It's about paperwork and cash flow. Small exporters, the Declaration notes, rarely lose deals because their product is wrong — they lose because working capital arrives too slowly and trade documentation costs too much. That sentence lands differently depending on where you're building from. It's an abstraction in a metro-city pitch deck. It's Tuesday for a manufacturer in a smaller city trying to ship an order before a buyer walks.

Two mechanisms target this directly: new Guiding Principles for Credit Assessment Frameworks for export-oriented MSMEs, and the Jaipur Consensus, which is studying an invoice-discounting mechanism. India also hosted the first-ever BRICS SME Forum, in Agra, producing a report specifically on MSME competitiveness and access to finance. None of it is glamorous. All of it sits closer to the actual constraint most non-metro founders describe than anything in the AI paragraphs.

Who actually did what

It helps to separate one country's initiative from the bloc's shared position. India, as chair, set the summit's theme, hosted the SME Forum and February's AI Impact Summit, and pushed hardest for both the Incubator Network and the proposed Startup Fund — alongside proposing a BRICS Risk Lab at GIFT City, Gujarat, and a public knowledge portal for the New Development Bank's playbooks and financed projects. China extended zero-tariff access to fifty-three African countries and hosted the World AI Conference in Shanghai. Russia hosted the New Development Bank's annual meeting in Moscow in May and will host the BRICS science-funding programme's ten-year milestone event in October. Brazil, having steered the bloc's economic strategy through its own 2025 chairship, hosted COP30 in Belém — where the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, a results-based forest-financing mechanism, launched. South Africa co-proposed, with Brazil, an international panel on inequality. The UAE and Indonesia co-lead the Mangrove Alliance for Climate, and Ethiopia and Iran now carry BRICS-wide backing for their pending WTO accession bids.

At the Business Forum that preceded the summit, India's Prime Minister added scale to all of this: BRICS, counting both members and partners, has grown to twenty-one countries, up from the four that founded it in 2006. He also asked the bloc to help roughly a hundred BRICS startups a year scale into other BRICS markets, pointing to the Incubator Network and new MSME-focused digital tools introduced during India's chairship as the way to do it.

The opportunity list hiding inside a diplomatic document

Read past the finance paragraphs and the Declaration starts to look like a fairly specific list of global problems BRICS wants innovation applied to. Food security gets a proposed BRICS Grain Exchange, an agro-input and genetic-resource network called AGRIN, and work on drought-resilient seed systems. Health gets a push toward eliminating tuberculosis, an early-warning system for infectious disease, a shared digital-health-architecture playbook, and a proposed Vaccine R&D Centre. Climate gets the Tropical Forest Forever Facility and a new Carbon Markets Partnership. Clean energy gets hydrogen value-chain standards and shared guiding principles for smart grids and storage. Digital public infrastructure gets a shared repository so other Global South countries can study — and replicate — India's UPI-style digital rails. And circularity gets Extended Producer Responsibility frameworks and a new sustainable-lifestyles knowledge network.

None of this is a startup program in the traditional sense. It's closer to a shared research and policy agenda. But for anyone building in agri-tech, health-tech, climate-tech, or the infrastructure layer of fintech, it's about as clear a signal as diplomacy usually gives about where public money and cross-border cooperation are headed next.

Young founders, women founders, and the access problem underneath both

Two groups got explicit, separate attention. First-time and young founders have a proposed Virtual Platform for BRICS Youth Startups, alongside the existing Young Scientists Forum and Young Innovators Prize. Women-led enterprises have the BRICS Women's Business Alliance, pushing for better access to finance, markets, technology and digital tools — and 2026 saw the first-ever BRICS Women's Start-up Awards and BRICS Solutions Awards.

Underneath both sits the same market-access problem the Declaration is unusually direct about: developing-country MSMEs are structurally locked out of the higher-value segments of global manufacturing. The proposed fix is a Global Value Chain Action Plan running from 2026 to 2030, more Special Economic Zone cooperation, and digitised trade documentation — with China's zero-tariff opening to African countries cited as the kind of access this is meant to create more of. Leaders also flagged the other side of that coin: new-generation protectionism, like carbon border taxes and unilateral tariffs, as a real threat to the same access they're trying to build.

What this means if you're not building in a metro

At an event like this, the temptation is to skim for the biggest number and move on. There isn't one here yet — the Startup Innovation Fund is a proposal, not a cheque. What's actually on the table is a map: working capital for exporters, credit systems for MSMEs, resilience infrastructure for food and health, digital rails other countries want to copy from India, and a market-access agenda built on the assumption that small manufacturers deserve a seat at the table.

That map runs directly through the kind of unglamorous, infrastructure-adjacent, Tier II and Tier III problems that rarely make it into a metro-city pitch deck. If you're building toward MSME finance, agri-resilience, health systems, or the plumbing behind digital public infrastructure, this summit didn't hand you a cheque. It confirmed you're pointed in a direction twenty-one countries just spent two days agreeing was worth building toward.

— About RisingIndia: RisingIndia (RisingIndia ThinkTank) is sector agnostic venture studio for sustainable entrepreneurship, co-building startups across Tier II and Tier III cities in EdTech, HealthTech, CleanTech, AgriTech, and social enterprise.

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