Sarvam AI

In August 2023, two researchers who had spent years making AI work for India — not merely work in India — stepped away from academia and government advisory roles to start a company. Pratyush Kumar and Vivek Raghavan had seen the same pattern repeat: India's 1.4 billion people were being served by models trained overwhelmingly on English data, built by companies on the other side of the world, running on infrastructure India did not own.

Building the Full Stack from Scratch

Sarvam AI's ambition is not to wrap an existing open-source model and localise it — it is to own the entire generative AI stack, from foundational model training to inference infrastructure to user-facing interfaces, within Indian borders. The company's February 2026 landmark was the open-sourcing of Sarvam-30B and Sarvam-105B, both trained from scratch using Indian-language-rich datasets and a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture. The 105B model, branded Indus in its consumer app form, activated approximately 9 billion parameters per token and supported a 128,000-token context window — trained entirely on government-allocated H100 GPUs inside India.

• Saaras V3 — multilingual speech-to-text supporting 22 Indian languages with real-time streaming
• Bulbul V3 — text-to-speech with natural prosody across Indian accents and scripts
• Sarvam Vision — a vision-language model for OCR and document understanding in Indian scripts, scoring 84.3% on olmOCR-Bench, outperforming Gemini 3 Pro and DeepSeek OCR v2
• Sarvam Arya — an enterprise AI reliability layer for business-critical deployments

Sovereign AI and the IndiaAI Mission

In April 2025, the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology selected Sarvam — chosen from 67 applicants — to build India's first indigenous sovereign LLM under the ₹10,372 crore IndiaAI Mission. The government provided subsidised access to 4,096 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, making it possible to train at a scale otherwise out of reach for a startup of Sarvam's size. Partnerships with UIDAI (Aadhaar), Microsoft, and Nokia followed. The Indus consumer app launched in beta in February 2026 with 50,000+ Play Store downloads within weeks, signalling consumer appetite for a home-built Indian AI assistant.