Building for the billion

THE AI-FIRST COMPANY WILL BUILD FROM THE GROUND UP — NOT JUST TINKERING AT THE EDGES OF INNOVATION BUT OWNING THE FULL STACK

- AYANTI BERA

THE ASPIRATION AT Sarvam, as the word meaning 'all' in Sanskrit suggests, is to achieve in AI (artificial intelligence) something that encompasses everybody. That's precisely what Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar set out to do when they founded the Bengaluru-based startup in July 2023. "We want to build GenAI that a billion Indians can use," they would often say in their multiple public interactions.

The moment to finally walk the talk has finally arrived for the two scholars with a wealth of experience. With the government choosing Sarvam to build India's first sovereign foundational AI model, the two founders now step into a new chapter of their entrepreneurial journey that will bring them closest to the vision that drove Sarvam's creation: building population-scale AI solutions.

What ignited their vision was the emergence of DeepSeek, which disrupted the AI landscape that was largely shaped by western tech behemoths. "DeepSeek proved that one doesn't need billions to build a competent model," the duo had said in a media interview.

Before founding Sarvam, Raghavan and Kumar had worked together at AI4Bharat, a research initiative by IIT Madras to develop open-source Indian language AI. The initiative developed a wide range of datasets, tools, and models focusing on natural language understanding, automatic speech recognition, transliteration-converting text between scripts of Indian languages and English, and speech synthesis.