Sarvam AI company announced raising a sum of 41 million dollars in the Indian startup race that lasted five months, with the aim of building a comprehensive range of generative artificial intelligence offerings.
This financial amount of 41 million dollars is distributed between the seed and Series A funding rounds. Lightspeed led the funding rounds in collaboration with Khosla Ventures and PeakX Partners.
Vivek Raghavan, founder of Sarvam AI based in Bangalore, told TechCrunch that his company is developing large linguistic models that support Indian languages.
He also added that his company is working on creating a platform that allows businesses to build applications using large linguistic models, from writing the application and deploying it on popular platforms to monitoring records and conducting custom assessments.
Sarvam AI also focuses on developing LLMs that rely on voice as a virtual interface in India. The aim of this strategy, in addition to focusing on supporting local languages, is to meet the specific needs of the Indian market.
Raghavan said, “This requires a change in the current open model structures and training them using specialized methods for teaching a new language. The advantage is that the models produced will be more efficient (in terms of necessary symbols) in understanding and generating the Indian language compared to any available linguistic models.”
Sarvam was founded by Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, who previously worked at the non-profit AI4Bharat organization supported by Microsoft, about five months ago. Raghavan also spent more than a decade at UIDAI, the overseeing body of India’s prevalent Aadhaar identity system.
He said, “I have seen the immense innovation value in foundational layers and their distribution across populations. India has proven its ability to leverage technology differently, and with GenAI, we have the opportunity to rethink how this technology can add value to people’s lives.”
The startup company plans to provide its first model to the public in the near future.
Sarvam’s investments come at a time when investors globally are competing to boost and support the progress of artificial intelligence, relying on the assumption that advancements in AI will make many industries more efficient and see startups achieve massive returns.
Although India is home to one of the largest startup ecosystems in the world, it has not substantially impacted advanced artificial intelligence developments quickly.
No Indian competitor has emerged to challenge the supremacy of giants in major language models like ChatGPT from OpenAI, Anthropic from Amazon, and Bard from Google. In September, the strong Indian company “Reliance” collaborated with Nvidia and revealed plans to build a large linguistic model trained on diverse Indian languages.
Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, stated: “We see that many countries are making governmental efforts to build GenAI models due to their strategic importance.
We need companies like Sarvam AI to develop deep expertise in the field of artificial intelligence in India and for India.” Khosla Ventures was the first founding investor in OpenAI and regained an investment worth 50 million dollars, totaling returns to 5 billion dollars.
Hemanth Mohantra, partner at Lightspeed, stated that Sarvam AI has a “unique approach” that combines innovative models and application development to create “broadly distributed” solutions for India.
