Sarvam AI

Sarvam AI is a Bengaluru-based company founded in 2023 by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, both previously part of the AI4Bharat project at IIT Madras. The company builds large language models, speech systems, and translation tools trained specifically for India's languages, dialects, and accents rather than adapted afterward from English-first models. In 2023 it raised roughly $41 million in combined seed and Series A funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Peak XV Partners, and Khosla Ventures, and it has since been selected by the Government of India's IndiaAI Mission to build the country's sovereign large language model. Its model lineup includes Sarvam-30B and Sarvam-105B chat models trained from scratch on Indian compute rather than fine-tuned from Western base models, alongside Saaras for speech-to-text with automatic translation, Mayura for formal and colloquial translation across ten Indian languages, and Bulbul for text-to-speech in six Indian voices. Sarvam Vision adds document intelligence for scanned or photographed text. All of this is exposed through a pay-as-you-go API with free starting credits, aimed at developers and enterprises building India-specific products. Because the models are purpose-built around Indian languages and usage patterns, they are a narrower fit for teams whose primary need is general-purpose, English-first AI.