Sarvam AI Launches Offline 'Sarvam Edge'
Indian AI startup Sarvam AI launched "Sarvam Edge," an offline AI stack designed for smartphones and connected devices. The platform enables fully offline AI inference and workflow automation to address rising cloud costs, privacy mandates, and unreliable connectivity. This approach is particularly relevant for distributed supply chain and retail operations in emerging markets.
- The company was founded in August 2023 by Dr. Vivek Raghavan, who has experience building India's digital public infrastructure, and Dr. Pratyush Kumar, who previously led the open-source Indian languages AI effort, AI4Bharat. - In December 2023, Sarvam AI raised $41 million in a Series A funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures, marking one of the largest early-stage funding rounds for an Indian AI startup. - A core focus for the company is developing generative AI models for India's diverse languages and voice-first interfaces. Before Sarvam Edge, the company released "OpenHathi," an open-source Hindi large language model based on Meta's Llama 2 architecture that performs on par with GPT-3.5 for Indic tasks. - Sarvam AI was selected by the Indian government as part of the IndiaAI Mission to build the country's first sovereign large language model. This initiative grants the company access to 4,000 GPUs to develop a foundational model from scratch, which will be optimized for Indian languages and deployed on domestic infrastructure. - The "Sarvam Edge" model for on-device tasks is one of three variants being developed under the government's sovereign LLM project, alongside "Sarvam-Large" for advanced reasoning and "Sarvam-Small" for real-time interactive applications. - For its cloud-based offerings, Sarvam AI is collaborating with Microsoft to make its Indic voice LLM available on the Azure platform, enabling enterprises to build scalable, real-time, voice-based generative AI applications.
