Sarvam AI is an Indian artificial intelligence startup founded in August 2023 by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, both previously associated with AI4Bharat at IIT Madras. It focuses on large language models and multimodal systems for Indian languages and Indian use cases, in a country with dozens of major languages poorly served by English-centric models.
In April 2025 the Government of India, under its IndiaAI Mission, selected Sarvam to build India’s sovereign large language model - an indigenous foundational model built from scratch on domestic compute, designed for reasoning, optimised for voice, and fluent across Indian languages, intended for secure population-scale deployment. The stated goal was technological independence so that data would not have to leave national borders.
Why a business reader should care: Sarvam is India’s flagship in the global race to build sovereign models, and its government selection shows how states are now picking national champions and funding compute directly, rather than waiting for the private market to deliver a domestic alternative.