AI Startup Sarvam Raises $41 Million to Tap India Growth
Emerging from stealth mode, Sarvam AI has revealed that it has secured a total of $41 million, as the five-month-old Indian business works to develop a range of full-stack generative artificial intelligence technologies in the most populated country in the world.
The seed and Series A investment rounds together raised 41 million dollars in capital. Together with Peak XV Partners, Lightspeed managed the Series A round as well as co-led the seed. Khosla Ventures along with Peak XV also took part in the Series A investment.
Image Source: bloomberg.com
According to Vivek Raghavan, founder of Sarvam AI, the Bengaluru-based business is developing extensive language models which incorporate Indian languages, as reported by TechCrunch. The firm is also developing a platform that would let companies use large language models in their development.
Currently employing roughly eighteen people, Sarvam AI is concentrating on developing LLMs using speech as the preferred UI in India. This approach, together with its focus on local language assistance, tries to uniquely address the needs of the Indian market.
“This requires us to change the architecture of existing open models and to train them in custom ways to teach the new language. The advantage is that the resultant models are more efficient (in terms of tokens consumed) for understanding and generating Indian language than any of the existing LLMs,” said Raghavan.
About five months ago, Raghavan along with Pratyush Kumar, both former employees of information technology veteran Nandan Nilekani-supported AI4Bharat of Indian Institute of Technology Madras, founded Sarvam. Raghavan also worked with UIDAI, the organisation in charge of the widely used Aadhaar identity system in India, for more than ten years.
“I have seen firsthand the enormous value in innovating at foundational layers and deploying at population scale,” he said. “India has demonstrated that it can harness technology differently, and with GenAI we have an opportunity to reimagine how this technology can add value to people’s lives.”
Business will launch First Model in the Market in few Weeks
During the next several weeks, the business intends to release the initial model to the market.
The Sarvam investment arrives at a period in which investors across the world are scrambling to find and support AI breakthroughs, betting on the idea that innovations in the field would boost productivity across a wide range of sectors and that cutting-edge firms will generate profits that will last for generations.
Despite having one of the biggest ecosystems for startups globally, India has not yet had a significant influence on the quickly developing field of artificial intelligence. There are currently no native Indian competitors standing a chance against the might of major language model behemoths like Google’s Bard, Amazon-supported Anthropic, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
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