A BOLD BET FOR AI SOVEREIGNTY

SARVAM AI MAY NOT CREATE A TECTONIC SHIFT LIKE DEEPSEEK, BUT IN INDIA, IT HOLDS A WORLD OF POSSIBILITIES.

- BY V. KESHAVDEV

INTELLIGENCE WAS NEVER a virtue that humans aspired to—till we got artificial about it. And in this ever-intensifying race for supremacy in artificial intelligence (AI), the world has largely been a spectator to a Silicon Valley spectacle. From OpenAI’s astronomical funding rounds to Anthropic’s quiet but calculated ascent, the landscape was largely shaped by western tech behemoths. The status quo was disrupted by China, with DeepSeek emerging as a formidable player. The company revealed that it trained its V3 model in just two months, spending under $6 million and using the relatively cheaper Nvidia H800 GPUs. In other words, it operates at 5% of the cost of traditional models.

But what about India? While the country has long been a thriving hub for software services, with a deep talent pool that has also powered global tech giants, there was a crying need for an AI-first company that builds from the ground up—not just tinkering at the edges of innovation but owning the full stack. That is exactly what Sarvam AI wants to achieve—it “seeks” to make a “deep” and lasting change in the AI narrative.

Founded in July 2023 by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, it 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.

Kumar’s vision is clear: India needs its own foundational AI models, ones that are not just adapted from western counterparts but built from scratch, trained on Indian data, and deployed securely within the nation’s borders. “Come 2040, India must have companies capable of training and deploying these models independently,” he tells Fortune India.