The Firm That Helped Epic Beat Google Just Opened in Bengaluru, as India’s Digital Competition Bill Nears Its Endgame
Keystone, a US-headquartered advisory firm that blends economists, technologists and management scientists, has established Keystone India with Bengaluru as its first hub in the country. The press release says the Bengaluru team will support Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Goldman Sachs and Amgen, along with India’s largest law firms, as they navigate “market structure, regulatory complexity, litigation exposure and platform risk.”
That is a polite description of a sharper moment. Keystone is one of the firms that built the economic case in Epic Games’ landmark antitrust victory over Google in the United States — a jury verdict that found Google liable for monopolizing two Android app markets. Now it is setting up shop in a country whose government is weeks away from receiving the final report of a market study that will shape India’s own digital competition law, with a draft bill possible as early as the Winter Session of Parliament.
Professional-services firms rarely open offices out of sentiment. They staff demand they can see coming. Keystone’s arrival is best read as a bet that India is about to generate the kind of work that has kept the firm growing 35 to 40 percent annually for most of the past decade: high-stakes platform litigation, competition economics, AI system audits and technical investigations.
Who Keystone Actually Is
Keystone was founded in 2003 by Greg Richards and Marco Iansiti of Harvard Business School, on the premise that technology disputes needed advisors who understood both the code and the economics. Today the firm fields roughly a hundred competition economists and an affiliated network of academics and former regulators, including Stanford economist Susan Athey — formerly chief economist of Microsoft and of the US Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division — as its Chief Scientific Advisor.
The firm’s recent history matters for understanding the Bengaluru move. In January 2026, Audax Private Equity acquired a majority stake; Jeff Marowits, a 22-year veteran of the firm, became CEO, and the firm’s supply-chain AI software platform was spun out into a separate company, Keystone AI. Since then Keystone has expanded on a private-equity timetable: a Washington, D.C. office opened in 2025 with two antitrust economists hired from the Department of Justice, and now Bengaluru.
Its track record in platform disputes is the credential. Marowits led Keystone’s contributions to Epic’s win over Google. The firm has advised Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Amgen, Oracle and TikTok across antitrust, intellectual property, tax and consumer-protection matters. Its K.ATS team — about 50 computer scientists, data scientists and engineers — runs cleanroom infrastructure that ingests terabytes of confidential source code and data from the world’s largest technology companies, the raw material of modern technology litigation.
What the Bengaluru Office Actually Is
The release describes “substantial investments” and hiring “over the next two years” without numbers. Marowits supplied them to BusinessLine: the Bengaluru office currently has about 10 people, has already tripled in size over the past three to four months, and plans to grow two- to threefold over the next 12 to 18 months.
That is a beachhead, not a campus. But the nature of the work matters more than the headcount. K.ATS, the technical arm that will anchor the India effort, is led by Rohit Chatterjee, a Senior Partner who studied engineering at Bengaluru’s R.V. College of Engineering before his Columbia doctorate. The team analyzes source code, audits AI systems, and assesses platform architecture — work that courts, regulators and boards increasingly require, and that until now has been performed almost entirely from Boston, San Francisco, London and Washington.
Bengaluru already hosts more than 1,700 Global Capability Centres, and the story of the past decade has been their climb up the value chain. Keystone’s entry extends that climb into a category with higher stakes and higher confidentiality than anything outsourced before: courtroom-grade technical analysis conducted under cleanroom conditions.
Why the Digital Competition Bill Matters to Keystone’s Clients
India’s Digital Competition Bill has been in progress since 2023, when the government constituted the Committee on Digital Competition Law. A draft Bill released in March 2024 proposed an ex-ante regime — modelled loosely on the EU’s Digital Markets Act — under which enterprises crossing certain thresholds in nine “core digital services” would be designated Systemically Significant Digital Enterprises and made subject to conduct obligations before any finding of harm.
Facing pushback from both global technology firms and Indian startups, the government held the Bill back and commissioned an empirical study. The Ministry of Corporate Affairs signed an agreement with MDI Gurgaon in May 2026; the final report is expected by October 2026. In August 2026, Parliament’s Standing Committee on Finance publicly urged the government to finalise the Bill and retain the ex-ante framework. Public reporting suggests a draft could arrive as early as December 2026 or February 2027, with thresholds recalibrated to capture primarily global — largely American — platforms while excluding most Indian ones. That last characterisation comes from US industry advocacy and is contested in Indian policy circles; either way, the firms in the frame are Keystone’s client roster.
There is also an enforcement backdrop. As of April 2025, the Competition Commission of India had impos ed ₹20,350 crore in penalties, of which ₹18,512 crore had been stay ed or dismiss ed on appeal. India’s big-tech enforcement record is real but contest ed — which is precisely the condition that generates sustain ed demand for rigorous economic and technical argument, on both sides.
Where It Fits in the Market
On their public listings, none of Keystone’s closest peers — Compass Lexecon (23 offices, Asia operations run from Singapore and China), Analysis Group (1,100-plus economists across North America and Europe), Cornerstone Research (1,000-plus professionals across the US, UK and EU) — has an India office. Keystone appears to be the first of the elite US economics consultancies to establish one. TechRecast could not verify this beyond those firms’ own location pages, and the situation may change quickly if the Digital Competition Bill passes.
Inside India, competition economics capacity sits largely within law-firm ecosystems rather than standalone consultancies. If India’s ex-ante regime materialises, the centre of gravity for digital-markets advisory shifts from Delhi’s law offices toward multidisciplinary teams — which is the gap Keystone is positioning for.
The Question the Announcement Doesn’t Answer
The release says the Bengaluru team “will support” Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Goldman Sachs and Amgen. What it does not say is what any of these firms has actually commissioned in India. The nam ed companies are Keystone’s disclos ed global clients; no India engagement is announc ed. For a firm whose stock-in-trade is appearing on opposite sides of the world’s biggest platform disputes — Epic against Google, while advising Microsoft and Meta elsewhere — the conflict-management question in a small, concentrated Indian market is a live one the firm has not addressed publicly.
The second unanswered question is dependence. Keystone’s India thesis assumes the Digital Competition Bill arrives in a form that generates compliance and litigation work, and that CCI’s technical capacity grows as the Standing Committee recommends. If the Bill is delay ed, dilut ed, or mir ed in the appeal-driven quicksand that has swallow ed most of the CCI’s penalty record, Bengaluru’s growth curve flattens. The office is a bet on Indian regulation becoming more American in its appetite for economic and technical argument. That is a reasonable be t, not a certainty.
What This Means for Buyers and Builders
For general counsel and Indian law firms, a local K.ATS presence changes the logistics of platform litigation — source-code analysis and AI audits that previously requir ed flying work to Boston can now run closer to home, assuming the confidentiality infrastructure matches. For India’s competition bar, a well-capitalised foreign entrant is both a referral partner and a competitor for talent. And, or anyone watching the Digital Competition Bill, the arrival is a market opinion worth noting: the people who monetise platform conflict are opening in India before the law exists.
None of this makes Keystone’s move a guarantee of anything. A 10-person office can stay 10 people if Indian regulation stalls. But firms like Keystone do not expand on hope; they expand on pipelines. The pipeline here is India’s imminent decision about how to regulate the world’s largest technology companies — and, for once, the firms being regulat ed and the firm that will argue about it are arriving in the same city at the same time.
Editor’s Note
This article is based on a press release issued by Keystone on September 25, 2026, and on independent reporting. Company-reported information includes all claims about Keystone India’s purpose and client roster; the firm’s track record (including its work on Epic Games v. Google), ownership, leadership, headcount and growth figures come from Keystone’s own disclosures, the Audax Private Equity transaction announcements of January 2026, and a BusinessLine interview with CEO Jeff Marowits published September 24, 2026.
The Digital Competition Bill timeline draws on a Lok Sabha answer of August 3, 2026, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance’s 37th Report of August 10, 2026, and reporting by MediaNama, the Financial Express and nasscom; the characterisation of recalibrated thresholds as targeting US firms reflects analysis by the US Chamber of Commerce’s Global Innovation Policy Center and is contest ed. CCI penalty figures are as stated to Parliament as of April 30, 2025. TechRecast could not independently verify any specific India engagement for Keystone’s named clients, the firm’s investment amount in India, or definitive first-mover status among peer economics consultancies beyond those firms’ published office listings.