The Union government, under the IndiaAI Mission, has selected homegrown AI startup Sarvam to build India’s sovereign Large Language Model (LLM). In a first-of-its-kind initiative, Sarvam will receive dedicated compute resources to build an indigenous foundational model from scratch. Capable of reasoning, designed for voice, and fluent in Indian languages, the model will be ready for secure, population-scale deployment.

Founded in July 2023 by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, Sarvam aims to make Generative AI accessible at scale in India. Both co-founders were previously involved with AI4Bharat, a research initiative focussed on open-source Indian language AI. Raghavan brings over a decade of experience from the UIDAI, which oversees Aadhaar, while Kumar, a PhD graduate from ETH Zürich and an IIT Bombay alumnus, co-founded AI4Bharat to advance Indian language AI applications.

“Building India’s sovereign model from the ground up is a significant step toward Atmanirbhar Bharat. The sovereign model will be built, deployed, and optimised in India, using local infrastructure and developed by a new generation of Indian talent,” the startup said in a statement.

This initiative aims to promote strategic autonomy, accelerate domestic innovation, and secure India’s leadership in AI for the long term.

"We are confident that Sarvam’s models will be competitive with global models," said Ashwini Vaishnaw, Union Minister for Electronics & Information Technology, Railways, and Information & Broadcasting.

Sarvam is on a mission to build the bedrock of sovereign AI for India and make GenAI a reality for Bharat. Sarvam has already demonstrated proven capability in developing foundational models proficient in Indian languages. What started as a research lab has evolved into a full-stack Sovereign AI platform that empowers governments, enterprises, and nonprofits to use GenAI solutions effectively. Sarvam’s models outperform leading frontier models on benchmarks in Indian languages, and are designed to be cost-effective and scalable for India.

“We are humbled by the responsibility bestowed upon us to build India’s sovereign model, and we are ready to build AI that reaches every corner of the country. This is a crucial step toward building critical national AI infrastructure. Our goal is to build multi-modal, multi-scale foundation models from scratch. When we do, a universe of applications unfolds. For citizens, this means interacting with AI that feels familiar, not foreign. For enterprises, this means unlocking intelligence without sending their data beyond borders,” said Raghavan, Co-founder of Sarvam.

“We are deeply grateful to the Government of India for its vision and support in advancing AI,” said Kumar, Co-founder of Sarvam. “Building an AI ecosystem for India has always been core to Sarvam’s mission, where our research, technology, and models empower builders to create solutions for the country. As part of the Sovereign LLM proposal, we are developing three model variants: Sarvam-Large for advanced reasoning and generation, Sarvam-Small for real-time interactive applications, and Sarvam-Edge for compact on-device tasks. We are collaborating with AI4Bharat at IIT Madras, a leader in Indian language AI research, to build these models. Driving this effort is a best-in-class team at Sarvam that understands the depth and complexity of AI development like few others.”