Key Takeaways Before You Read
- Sarvam AI is India’s first full-stack, indigenous AI Platform built to serve Indian languages, industries, and citizens at scale.
- Founded in 2023 by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, the company is headquartered in Bengaluru, Karnataka.
- Sarvam AI supports all 22 scheduled Indian languages, making it the most linguistically inclusive AI Application in Asia.
- The platform raised over $41 million in Series A funding, with major investors including Peak XV Partners and Lightspeed India.
- Sarvam 1 is its flagship large language model (LLM) trained on a massive corpus of multilingual Indian data.
- The government of India has partnered with Sarvam AI under the IndiaAI Mission to build sovereign AI infrastructure.
- Its AI Application stack covers speech-to-text, text-to-speech, translation, conversational AI, and domain-specific intelligence.
- Unlike OpenAI or Google, Sarvam AI is built specifically for the cultural, contextual, and linguistic nuances of Bharat.
- Industries such as banking, healthcare, agriculture, education, and e-governance are actively using Sarvam AI Platforms today.
- Sarvam AI has the potential to become the foundational AI Platform for India, similar to what OpenAI is for the Western world.
What Is Sarvam AI?
Sarvam AI is an Indian artificial intelligence startup founded in 2023 by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar. The company focuses on building large language models (LLMs) specially designed for India. Its main goal is to create AI systems that understand Indian languages, culture, and local business needs. Unlike many global AI platforms that mainly support English, Sarvam AI aims to make technology accessible in multiple Indian regional languages.
People are talking about Sarvam AI right now because India is working toward building its own AI ecosystem instead of depending fully on foreign companies. The startup has received attention due to government support and its mission to develop indigenous AI models. As AI tools become more popular worldwide, many users are searching for Indian alternatives, and Sarvam AI is emerging as one of the leading names in this space.
Sarvam AI mainly provides enterprise-level AI solutions rather than a public chatbot app. Businesses can use its AI models through APIs to build chatbots, automate customer support, process documents, and create multilingual content. The platform focuses on language understanding, translation, conversational AI, and automation tools. In simple terms, Sarvam AI is working to build powerful AI technology made specifically for India and its diverse population.[1]
Sarvam AI Founders, Launch Date and Origin Story
Sarvam AI was co-founded in 2023 by two visionary technologists: Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar. Vivek Raghavan previously served as Chief Product and Technology Officer at EkStep Foundation, the nonprofit behind DIKSHA, India’s national e-learning platform. He is also one of the key architects of India Stack, which powers Aadhaar, UPI, and DigiLocker. Pratyush Kumar is a researcher with deep expertise in natural language processing (NLP) and multilingual AI models, having contributed to several academic and open-source AI projects focused on Indian languages.
The company was formally launched and incorporated in early 2023, with its first major product announcements and public demonstrations coming in mid to late 2023. It gained significant attention after releasing Sarvam 1, its flagship LLM optimized for Indian languages, and after securing partnerships with the Indian government.
Founding Year: 2023 | Headquarters: Bengaluru, India | Domain: Multilingual AI Platforms and AI Applications
The origin story of Sarvam AI is deeply intertwined with India’s public digital infrastructure journey. Vivek Raghavan recognized a glaring gap: while India had hundreds of millions of non-English speakers, there was no AI Application capable of serving them in their own language with cultural accuracy. That gap became the founding thesis.
Mission and Vision for India’s AI Ecosystem
Sarvam AI‘s core mission is to build AI that speaks India’s languages and understands India’s contexts. The broader vision is to make India a global leader in AI not just as a consumer market, but as a builder and exporter of sovereign AI technology.
The company envisions a future where every Indian citizen, regardless of their language, literacy level, or internet access quality, can interact with powerful AI Applications that genuinely understand and help them. This means a farmer in rural Maharashtra getting crop advice in Marathi, a healthcare worker in Tamil Nadu reading AI-powered diagnostics in Tamil, or a student in West Bengal accessing personalized tutoring in Bengali.
Three pillars define Sarvam AI’s vision for India’s AI ecosystem: Sovereignty (India’s data stays in India), Inclusivity (every Indian language deserves AI-grade intelligence), and Scale (AI infrastructure that can serve a billion people simultaneously).
How Does Sarvam AI Work? Technology, LLM and Infrastructure
Sarvam AI is built on a layered technology stack. At its core is Sarvam 1, a large language model trained from scratch on a curated multilingual corpus covering all 22 scheduled Indian languages along with English. Unlike fine-tuned versions of GPT or Llama, Sarvam 1 is pre-trained natively on Indian language data, meaning it has genuine first-language fluency, not just translation capability.
The infrastructure layer leverages GPU clusters hosted in India, ensuring data sovereignty and low latency for Indian users. The AI AI solutions use a combination of transformer-based architectures, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and domain-specific instruction tuning to make models suitable for sectors like banking, healthcare, and government.
For voice AI, Sarvam AI has built advanced automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) engines that handle accented Indian English, regional dialects, and code-mixed speech. These are trained on hours of real Indian conversational data, making them significantly more accurate than any imported voice AI Application for Indian users.
The full AI Application lifecycle at Sarvam AI looks like this:
Multilingual Indian corpora across 22+ languages
Native LLM training on Indian data
Domain-specific instruction tuning
Cloud-hosted, low-latency Indian infra
Ready APIs for B2B and government
Key Features of Sarvam AI That Set It Apart
Sarvam AI is not just another AI chatbot layered on top of an existing foreign model. It is a ground-up, full-stack AI Platform with a distinct and powerful feature set that is carefully engineered to meet the realities of Indian users, businesses, and government institutions. Here is a detailed look at the features that make Sarvam AI genuinely unique in the global AI landscape:
Native Multilingual Intelligence Across 22+ Indian Languages
Sarvam AI is trained natively on all 22 constitutionally scheduled Indian languages, including Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Odia, Assamese, and more. Unlike systems that translate everything to English first and then back, Sarvam AI processes and generates content with genuine first-language fluency. This means idioms, honorifics, script-specific nuances, and sentence structures are all handled correctly, not approximated.
Advanced Voice AI with Dialect and Accent Awareness
The platform’s automatic speech recognition (ASR) engine is trained on thousands of hours of real Indian speech data, covering not just standard language but also dialects, accented speech, and noisy real-world environments like busy offices, public spaces, or fields. Whether it is a customer calling from a rural call center or a doctor dictating clinical notes in a hospital ward, Sarvam ASR consistently delivers high-accuracy transcription. Similarly, its text-to-speech (TTS) engine produces natural, expressive voice output in multiple Indian languages with region-appropriate intonation.
Code-Switching and Hinglish Comprehension
One of the most overlooked but critically important features of Sarvam AI is its ability to understand and generate code-switched speech and text. Indian users routinely mix English with their regional language, creating hybrid communication patterns like Hinglish (Hindi plus English), Tanglish (Tamil plus English), or Benglish (Bengali plus English). Sarvam AI handles this naturally, without breaking or misinterpreting the message, which makes it far more practical for real Indian user interactions than any purely monolingual model.
Full-Stack AI Platform with Developer-Grade APIs
Sarvam AI is not just a consumer chatbot. It is a full-stack AI Platform offering REST APIs for every major capability, including LLM inference, ASR, TTS, translation, and conversational AI agents. Developers and enterprises can integrate these APIs into their own mobile apps, web portals, CRM systems, or IoT devices with minimal effort. The APIs are well-documented, low-latency, and hosted in India, making them a practical choice for any Indian business building AI-powered experiences.
Data Sovereignty with India-Hosted Infrastructure
Every computation, every model inference, and every piece of data processed through Sarvam AI remains within India’s digital borders. This is a fundamental feature for sectors like banking, healthcare, and government, where data residency and compliance with Indian regulations are non-negotiable. Sarvam AI runs its infrastructure on GPU clusters hosted inside India, ensuring that no sensitive Indian citizen or enterprise data is ever routed through foreign servers.
Domain-Specific Fine-Tuning for Verticals
Sarvam AI does not offer a one-size-fits-all model. Its AI Platform supports domain-specific instruction tuning, meaning the same core LLM can be fine-tuned with healthcare terminology, banking compliance language, legal vocabulary, or agricultural knowledge depending on the deployment context. This makes Sarvam’s AI Applications significantly more accurate, relevant, and trustworthy within specialized industries compared to a generic general-purpose model used directly out of the box.
Low-Bandwidth and Edge-Optimized Performance
India has hundreds of millions of users on 2G and 3G connections in tier 2, tier 3, and rural areas. Sarvam AI’s models are designed to work efficiently under constrained network conditions. Smaller, distilled versions of its models are available for edge deployment, ensuring that AI Applications can function reliably even on low-end Android devices or in areas with intermittent internet connectivity. This is a feature that no Western AI Platform currently prioritizes, and it makes Sarvam AI uniquely suited for real Bharat.
India Stack Integration Readiness
Sarvam AI is architecturally designed to integrate with India’s existing digital public infrastructure, commonly known as India Stack. This includes Aadhaar for identity verification, UPI for payment-linked AI workflows, DigiLocker for document access, and ABHA for health record connectivity. This integration readiness means enterprises and governments can build end-to-end citizen-facing AI Applications that are deeply embedded in India’s existing trusted digital ecosystem rather than operating in isolation.
Open Model Access Under IndiaAI Mission
As part of its role in the national IndiaAI Mission, Sarvam AI has made select models available under open access licenses. This allows Indian universities, research institutions, government bodies, and startups to build upon its foundational AI work without starting from scratch. This open-source-adjacent strategy is accelerating India’s broader AI Application ecosystem, enabling dozens of secondary innovations to emerge on top of Sarvam’s already powerful multilingual foundation models.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Real-Time Accuracy
Sarvam AI incorporates retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) into its AI Platform, allowing models to pull real-time or domain-specific information from connected knowledge bases before generating responses. This means an AI Application powered by Sarvam can answer questions using the latest policy documents, product catalogs, medical guidelines, or legal databases rather than relying only on what the model memorized during training. For enterprises and governments where accuracy and currency of information is critical, this feature is a significant differentiator.
Sarvam AI Features at a Glance
| Feature | What It Does | Who Benefits Most |
|---|---|---|
| Native Multilingual LLM | Understands and generates 22+ Indian languages natively | All Indian users and enterprises |
| Dialect-Aware ASR | Transcribes accented and dialect-heavy Indian speech accurately | Telecallers, healthcare, rural apps |
| Natural TTS | Produces a human-sounding voice in regional languages | IVR, EdTech, voice assistants |
| Code-Switching Support | Handles Hinglish, Tanglish, and other blended Indian speech | Consumer apps, chatbots, support tools |
| Domain Fine-Tuning | Customizes models for banking, health, legal, and agri sectors | Enterprises and gov departments |
| Data Sovereignty | All data stays within Indian server infrastructure | BFSI, healthcare, government bodies |
| RAG Integration | Pulls real-time data from connected knowledge bases | Legal, policy, and compliance use cases |
| India Stack Ready | Connects with Aadhaar, UPI, DigiLocker, ABHA natively | Fintech, govtech, health-tech builders |
| Edge-Optimized Models | Runs efficiently on low-bandwidth and low-end devices | Rural, tier 3 and tier 4 deployments |
| Open Model Access | Foundational models available to researchers and startups | AI developers, academia, innovation labs |
Where Is Sarvam AI Used? Industries and Applications
Sarvam AI’s AI Platforms and AI Applications are already being deployed across multiple critical sectors in India. Here is a look at where the technology is creating the most impact:
Government and Public Services: Sarvam AI has been selected as a partner under the IndiaAI Mission to build the national AI infrastructure stack. Its voice AI capabilities power multilingual citizen helplines where a resident in any state can ask questions in their native language and receive accurate responses from AI-powered government portals.
Banking and Financial Services: Leading private banks and fintech companies in India use Sarvam’s conversational AI Platform to run regional-language KYC assistants, loan eligibility chatbots, and fraud alert systems that communicate naturally with customers in Hindi, Marathi, Kannada, and other languages.
Healthcare: Hospitals and health-tech startups use Sarvam ASR and TTS to transcribe doctor-patient conversations in real time, generate multilingual discharge summaries, and power telemedicine voice bots that can reach patients in tier 3 and tier 4 cities.
EdTech: AI Application companies in the education sector integrate Sarvam’s APIs to deliver personalized tutoring in regional languages, making quality education accessible to students who do not primarily communicate in English.
Agriculture: AgriTech platforms use Sarvam’s voice AI to provide crop advisory services to farmers in their local dialects, bridging the advisory gap between modern AI intelligence and rural agricultural communities.
Sarvam AI vs OpenAI vs Google DeepMind: Key Differences
How does Sarvam AI stack up against the global giants of the AI world? The comparison below reveals why India needs its own sovereign AI Platform rather than depending entirely on imported solutions:
| Parameter | Sarvam AI | OpenAI (GPT-4o) | Google DeepMind (Gemini) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary Focus | Indian languages and contexts | General-purpose, English-first | Multimodal, global general AI |
| Language Support | 22+ Indian scheduled languages natively | 50+ languages (limited Indian depth) | 100+ languages (limited Indian depth) |
| Data Sovereignty | 100% India-hosted infrastructure | US-based servers, GDPR focus | Global cloud, US and EU focused |
| Government Partnerships | IndiaAI Mission, Central and State govts | US federal and select global govts | Multiple global government pilots |
| Voice AI Quality (India) | Excellent, dialect-aware | Good but accent-limited | Good but not dialect-deep |
| Pricing Accessibility | India-optimized, rupee-denominated | Dollar-based, premium pricing | Dollar-based with tiered access |
| Open Source Strategy | Open models under IndiaAI mission | Primarily closed source | Mix of open and closed models |
| Cultural Context | Deep Indian cultural embedding | Western-centric by default | Broad but not culturally deep |
The table above illustrates that Sarvam AI is not trying to beat OpenAI at its own game. It is carving out a distinct and critically important niche: being the AI Platform that actually works for India, by India, and because of India.
Sarvam AI Funding, Investors and Growth Journey
Sarvam AI’s funding journey reflects the growing confidence of both domestic and global investors in India’s ability to build world-class AI Platforms. The company secured its seed round in early 2023, which was led by Lightspeed India, one of the most prominent venture capital firms investing in Indian deep tech.
By mid-2024, Sarvam AI had closed a significant Series A round of approximately $41 million, with participation from Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia India), Lightspeed India, and other strategic investors. The company’s total funding places it among the best-capitalized AI startups in India.
Perhaps more significant than private capital is Sarvam AI’s inclusion in the IndiaAI Mission, through which the Indian government is actively funding the creation of sovereign AI Platforms. This public-private partnership model gives Sarvam AI a unique growth lever: government-backed scale with startup-grade speed.
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Conclusion
Sarvam AI represents a significant step forward in India’s artificial intelligence journey. By focusing on building generative AI models tailored to Indian languages and region-specific needs, the company addresses one of the biggest gaps in the global AI landscape — linguistic and cultural inclusivity. In a country as diverse as India, where millions communicate in regional languages, Sarvam AI’s mission is both timely and transformative.
The company’s approach goes beyond simply developing AI tools; it aims to create a foundation for an inclusive digital future. By empowering businesses, government bodies, and individuals with accessible AI solutions, Sarvam AI contributes to productivity, innovation, and digital empowerment at scale. Its commitment to research, scalability, and real-world applications positions it as a promising player in the evolving AI ecosystem.
In the long run, if Sarvam AI continues to innovate responsibly and expand its technological capabilities, it has the potential to become a cornerstone of India’s AI-driven growth. Through sustained development and strategic partnerships, the company can help shape a future where advanced AI technology is not limited by language barriers but is accessible to every segment of society.
Frequently Asked Questions
Sarvam AI ek Indian artificial intelligence startup hai jo Large Language Models (LLMs) aur generative AI solutions. Company ka focus Indian languages ke liye powerful AI systems banana hai, taaki Bharat me businesses, developers aur government sectors AI ko effectively use kar saken.
Sarvam AI was co-founded by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar. Both founders have strong backgrounds in artificial intelligence research and technology development. Their goal is to build globally competitive AI infrastructure and foundational models designed specifically for India’s diverse linguistic and business ecosystem.
Yes, Sarvam AI is a India-based AI startup established to strengthen the country’s AI ecosystem. The company focuses on developing multilingual AI technologies and foundational models that support Indian languages, enabling digital transformation across industries including finance, healthcare, education, and public services.
Sarvam AI develops large language models, speech recognition systems, and multilingual AI platforms. These technologies help organizations automate workflows, enhance customer support, generate content, and analyze data efficiently. The company is dedicated to making advanced AI accessible, scalable, and relevant to India-specific needs.
Sarvam AI stands out due to its strong focus on Indian languages and region-specific use cases. While many global AI companies prioritize English-dominant models, Sarvam AI emphasizes multilingual capabilities, local datasets, and AI infrastructure designed specifically for India’s linguistic and cultural diversity.
Yes, Sarvam AI is actively working on developing its own Large Language Models (LLMs). These models are designed to support multiple Indian languages and enterprise applications. The goal is to provide scalable, efficient, and customizable AI solutions tailored to Indian businesses and developers.
Sarvam AI solutions are designed for startups, enterprises, developers, and government organizations. Their AI tools can be used for chatbot development, speech-to-text applications, customer service automation, multilingual communication, and AI-powered digital platforms across various industries.
Sarvam AI aims to position India as a global leader in artificial intelligence innovation. The company’s vision is to build foundational AI infrastructure that supports Indian languages, ensures scalability, and promotes secure AI deployment across sectors, empowering businesses and public institutions nationwide.
Reviewed & Edited By
Aman Vaths
Founder of Nadcab Labs
Aman Vaths is the Founder & CTO of Nadcab Labs, a global digital engineering company delivering enterprise-grade solutions across AI, Web3, Blockchain, Big Data, Cloud, Cybersecurity, and Modern Application Development. With deep technical leadership and product innovation experience, Aman has positioned Nadcab Labs as one of the most advanced engineering companies driving the next era of intelligent, secure, and scalable software systems. Under his leadership, Nadcab Labs has built 2,000+ global projects across sectors including fintech, banking, healthcare, real estate, logistics, gaming, manufacturing, and next-generation DePIN networks. Aman’s strength lies in architecting high-performance systems, end-to-end platform engineering, and designing enterprise solutions that operate at global scale.
