Amid criticism of the recently released large language model (LLM) by homegrown startup Sarvam AI, Zoho founder and chief scientist Sridhar Vembu has come out in its defence, exhorting the Sarvam team to keep "fighting the good fight".

Vembu, who built a global SaaS company from India by applying his unconventional business approach, said no product Zoho built ever became an instant hit, even when it was the first mover in a new market. "In defense of Sarvam.ai, I will point out that there is no product we have built that was ever an instant hit. Even when we were the first mover in a new market and we had done a lot of technical work, we only got slow traction. Instant success is neither necessary nor sufficient to succeed long term."

His reaction comes after Sarvam AI received online criticism over slow traction for its language model on Hugging Face, an AI company that hosts machine learning models, datasets, and tools.

The heated online debate started when an X user Deedy (@deedydas), a VC at the US-based Menlo Ventures, termed Sarvam-M's start on Hugging Face as "embarrassing". "India's biggest AI startup, $1B Sarvam, just launched its flagship LLM. It's a 24B Mistral small post-trained on Indic data with a mere 23 downloads 2 days after launch. In contrast, 2 Korean college students trained an open-source model that did ~200k last month. Embarrassing," he wrote on X.

He went on to say that "much of the Indian AI scene seems like more 'I want to do cool AI things that cool AI people do', not 'let's solve important hard problems'. No one is asking for a slightly better 24B Indic model. Clearly."

Later, he clarified that his criticism of Sarvam-M seemed to be "very misconstrued". "I’m not against trying. I’m not against Sarvam. I’m not saying India shouldn’t build AI. These are ridiculous things to insinuate. I’m disappointed at their direction and expected them to accomplish more with their resources."

The comments followed as Sarvam AI, the AI startup selected under the government's IndiaAI Mission to build India’s sovereign Large Language Model (LLM), launched its flagship LLM called Sarvam-M last Friday. The LLM is a 24-billion multilingual, hybrid-reasoning, text-only language model built on top of Mistral Small, a compact yet efficient open-weight AI model developed by Mistral AI, a French AI company known for its high-performance language models.

Bengaluru-based Sarvam AI claims it achieves a new benchmark across a range of Indian languages, math, and programming tasks for a model of its size. Sarvam-M is built for "versatility and designed to support a wide range of applications", including conversational agents, translation, educational tools, and much more.

Sarvam-M is open-sourced and accessible via Hugging Face, with APIs provided for developers. As of the filing of this report, Sarvam-M had 1,207 downloads on Hugging Face.

Amid the criticism, Sarvam co-founder Pratyush Kumar expressed optimism, saying that it's "great to be receiving feedback on Sarvam-M". "Please keep them coming. Will help strengthen our pipelines as we start to train our sovereign model."

Founded in July 2023 by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, Sarvam aims to make Generative AI accessible at scale in India. In April 2025, under the IndiaAI Mission, the Centre selected Sarvam to build India’s sovereign LLM. Sarvam will receive dedicated compute resources to build an indigenous foundational model from scratch.