Sarvam AI Launches Indus Chatbot
Indian AI firm Sarvam has publicly launched Indus AI Chat, a multilingual chatbot for Indian users on Android and iOS. The app is positioned as a homegrown alternative to global platforms, with a focus on strong Indic language support and locally relevant contextual answers. The launch is part of a broader trend of Indian startups building AI models tailored for the domestic market.
- The company was founded in July 2023 by Dr. Vivek Raghavan, who has extensive experience building India's digital public infrastructure like Aadhaar, and Dr. Pratyush Kumar, who has a background in open-source AI for Indian languages at AI4Bharat and has worked at Microsoft Research and IBM Research. - Sarvam AI secured $41 million in a Series A funding round in December 2023, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures. This was the largest Series A funding for an Indian AI startup at the time. - Before the consumer-facing Indus Chatbot, Sarvam AI released OpenHathi-Hi-v0.1 in December 2023, an open-source Hindi Large Language Model based on Meta's Llama2-7B architecture, which is available on Hugging Face for developers to build upon. - The Indus chatbot is likely powered by one of Sarvam's recently announced foundational models, Sarvam-30B or Sarvam-105B, which were built from the ground up in India. The company trained these models using 4,000 GPUs over six months with a team of around 40 researchers. - In addition to language models, the company is developing a full stack of AI solutions, including "Saaras" for speech-to-text, "Sarvam Vision" for document understanding in Indian scripts, and "Sarvam Edge" to allow AI models to run locally on devices without an internet connection. - The company is a key player in the IndiaAI Mission and was selected by the government to help develop India's sovereign large language model, granting it access to government-supported compute infrastructure. - Beyond the chatbot, Sarvam AI is also developing hardware, having showcased "Sarvam Kaze," AI-powered wearable glasses that support over 10 Indian languages for voice-based interaction. - Sarvam's business strategy includes a direct sales approach to co-develop domain-specific models with enterprises and government bodies, rather than just focusing on a free consumer chatbot.
