Sarvam AI Launches 'Indus' Chatbot for Indic Languages
As part of India's sovereign AI initiative, Sarvam AI has launched "Indus," a homegrown generative AI chatbot. The model supports over 22 Indic languages and Hinglish, positioning it for use in conversational commerce across India's diverse linguistic markets. A free beta is currently available on its app and website.
- Sarvam AI was founded in 2023 by Vivek Raghavan, who previously worked on India's digital public infrastructure like Aadhaar, and Pratyush Kumar, a former researcher at Microsoft and IBM who also has a background in open-source Indic AI with AI4Bharat. - The company raised $41 million in a Series A funding round in December 2023, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia Capital India) and Khosla Ventures. - Sarvam AI is one of the key companies selected by the Indian government for its IndiaAI Mission, a ₹10,372 crore initiative aimed at building sovereign AI models trained on Indian datasets to ensure data security and cultural relevance. - The Indus chatbot is powered by Sarvam's proprietary 105-billion parameter large language model, which was built from the ground up and is designed to be more efficient and culturally aware than models trained primarily on Western data. - Building for Indic languages presents unique challenges due to the relative scarcity of high-quality digital training data and the complexity of scripts compared to English. - The conversational commerce market in India is projected to grow from US$22.6 billion in 2023 to US$53.5 billion by 2028, driven by high mobile-first user behavior and the increasing adoption of WhatsApp-based business interactions. - Beyond the chatbot, Sarvam AI is developing a full suite of AI tools, including text-to-speech, translation, and vision models, signaling its ambition to create a comprehensive ecosystem for Indian-language AI applications.
