Sarvam AI has come out of stealth mode and announced it has raised $41 million as the five-month-old Indian startup races to build a suite of comprehensive AI offerings.
The $41 million funding round includes Seed and Series A funding rounds. Lightspeed led the Series A round, while co-leading the Seed with Peak XV Partners. Peak XV and Khosla Ventures also participated in the Series A funding.
The Bengaluru-based startup builds large language models that support Indian languages, Sarvam AI Vivek Raghavan told TechCrunch. The startup is also creating a platform that will allow businesses to build with LLMs — “everything from writing an app, deploying it to popular channels, observing logs, and custom assessment,” he said.
Sarvam AI also focuses on creating LLMs that use voice as the default interface in India. This strategy, coupled with its emphasis on local language support, aims to cater specifically to the demands of the Indian market.
“This requires us to change the architecture of existing open models and train them in ways adapted to teach the new language. The advantage is that the resulting models are more efficient (in terms of tokens consumed) for understanding and generating Indian language than any of the existing LLMs,” said Raghavan.
Sarvam was founded by Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, both of whom previously worked at Nandan Nilekani-backed IIT Madras tech veteran AI4Bharat, about five months ago. Raghavan additionally spent more than a decade at UIDAI, the entity that oversees India’s ubiquitous Aadhaar identity system.
“I’ve seen firsthand the enormous value of innovation at fundamental levels and growth at a population scale,” he said. “India has proven that it can harness technology in a different way, and with GenAI we have an opportunity to rethink how this technology can add value to people’s lives.”
The startup plans to release its first model in the coming weeks.
The investment in Sarvam comes at a time when investors worldwide are rushing to identify and support AI, on the premise that advances in AI will make countless industries more efficient and startups at the forefront will deliver generational returns.
Despite being home to one of the largest startup ecosystems in the world, India has yet to make a significant impact in the fast-growing AI arena. No homegrown Indian contender has emerged to challenge the dominance of major language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Amazon-backed Anthropic or Google’s Bard. (Indian powerhouse Reliance partnered with Nvidia in September, revealing plans to build a large language model that would be trained in different Indian languages.)
“We see many countries making mainstream efforts to build GenAI models given its strategic importance. We need companies like Sarvam AI to develop deep expertise to build AI in and for India,” said Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla. Khosla Ventures was the first institutional investor in OpenAI, turning a $50 million investment into a $5 billion return.
Hemant Mohapatra, Partner at Lightspeed, said Sarvam AI has a “unique approach” to combine model innovation and application development to create “population-scale” solutions for India. He added: “Lightspeed will be close partners and contribute with our deep capital stack and lessons learned from our global platform.”
Peak XV and Lightspeed India took less than a week to invest in Sarvam AI’s seed funding round earlier, according to a source with direct knowledge of the event.
“The Sarvam AI team led by Vivek and Pratyush is among the highest caliber AI teams we have seen emerging from India,” Harshjit Sethi, CEO of Peak XV, said in a statement.
“Vivek’s expertise in building large-scale systems with Pratyush’s expertise in artificial intelligence makes them uniquely positioned to build population-scale AI applications. Large-scale adoption of AI in India will require not only creating uniquely Indian use cases, but also delivering them at prices that everyone can afford, and we believe the Sarvam team is best positioned to achieve this.” .