Okay so here’s a fun one, what if the AI world stopped assuming English (or Mandarin, or whatever) is the default, and actually built something for the way India talks?
That’s basically the whole idea behind Sarvam AI. A bunch of IITians and research veterans looked at the entire ChatGPT wave and thought, cool, but where’s the version that gets Hindi slang, or a Tamil grandmother, or Hinglish typed at 2am?
Nobody was really building that. So they did!
Today Sarvam’s turned into one of the biggest names in Indian AI with serious funding, and a pretty bold goal of building AI models from scratch that actually understand India, instead of just translating for it.
In this blog, we’ll delve into the story of Sarvam AI and its founders.
About Sarvam AI
Sarvam AI is an Indian AI startup building foundational language models (like GPT and Gemini) but designed specifically for Indian languages and Indian context.
Not an English model with a translation layer bolted on. An actual from-scratch attempt at AI that thinks in Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Kannada, Hinglish, the whole mix of how India really communicates.
The startup comes with some serious backing, including support tied to India’s own AI mission, which is a pretty big deal.
Their focus areas span speech, text, and voice models, including tools that can understand regional accents, code-switching, and low-resource languages that most global models just don’t bother with.
Meet the Founders
Sarvam AI’s journey wouldn’t be what it is today without the vision of its founders. Let’s take a quick gander at the brains behind the brand!
- Dr. Vivek Raghavan
Dr. Vivek Raghavan studied at IIT Delhi, then did his M.S. and PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon.
Early in his career, he spent nearly 20 years in chip design and semiconductor tech, holding senior roles at firms like Synopsys and Magma Design Automation, and even co-founded a couple of EDA companies.
Then came the big shift. He joined UIDAI as Chief Product Manager and Biometric Architect, helping design and scale Aadhaar to over a billion users.
After that, he worked at the EkStep Foundation on Digital India Bhashini, focused on bringing government services to people in their own languages.
In August 2023, he co-founded Sarvam AI with Pratyush Kumar.
Today, Vivek serves as Co-Founder of Sarvam AI.
- Dr. Pratyush Kumar
Dr. Pratyush Kumar did his B.Tech in Electrical and Electronics Engineering at IIT Bombay, then went on to do his PhD in Computer Engineering at ETH Zurich.
After that, he spent years in research roles at IBM Research and Microsoft Research, and also served as adjunct faculty at IIT Madras.
Before Sarvam, he co-founded AI4Bharat, a research initiative focused on open-source AI tools and datasets for Indian languages, along with PadhAI, an affordable deep learning platform.
In 2023, he teamed up with Vivek Raghavan to start Sarvam AI.
Today, Pratyush serves as Co-Founder and CEO of Sarvam AI.
What Does Sarvam AI Offer?
Sarvam AI is full-stack Generative AI, meaning they’re building the foundational models themselves, from the ground up, specifically trained to understand Indian languages, accents, scripts, and that classic Hinglish mashup everyone actually types in real life.
The company recently rolled out multiple products in quick succession, including Bulbul V3, Sarvam Arya, and Sarvam Vision. Sarvam Vision is their OCR (text recognition) tool, and it’s genuinely turned heads; it’s reportedly outperformed models like Gemini and ChatGPT on accuracy benchmarks for reading and recognising text.
Which, for a homegrown startup going up against global giants, is a pretty big flex.
Beyond that, their focus areas span speech, voice, and text including tools that can actually understand a regional accent instead of mishearing it, or handle code-switching without falling apart mid-sentence.
Sarvam was also picked by the Indian government to help build the country’s first sovereign large language model under the IndiaAI Mission.
Sarvam AI’s Funding Journey
Sarvam AI has pulled in a total of USD 275 million across four funding rounds so far. The very first round landed on August 25, 2023, and the most recent one was a Series B, closed on June 15, 2026, bringing in USD 234 million with four investors backing that round.
Overall, the startup counts nine institutional investors and four angel investors in its corner.
Afterword
So that’s Sarvam AI in a nutshell, two founders who could’ve easily stayed comfortable in their global research and infrastructure careers, but chose to build something for India instead. From Aadhaar to AI4Bharat to now a USD 1.5 billion AI unicorn, the journey’s been fast, and it’s clearly just getting started!