Sarvam, a Five-Month-Old AI Venture from India, Raises $41M in Funding

Emerging from stealth mode, Sarvam AI has revealed that it has raised $41 million as the five-month-old Indian business works to develop a range of full-stack generative AI solutions in the most populated country in the world.

The seed and Series A investment rounds together raised $41 million in capital. Together with Peak XV Partners, Lightspeed led the Series A round and co-led the seed. Khosla Ventures and Peak XV also took part in the Series A investment.

According to Vivek Raghavan, founder of Sarvam AI, the Bengaluru-based business is developing extensive language models that support Indian languages, as reported by TechCrunch. In addition, he said, the startup is developing a platform that will enable companies to work with LLMs on “everything from writing an app, deploying it to popular channels, observing logs, and custom evaluation.”

Currently employing roughly eighteen people, Sarvam AI is concentrating on developing LLMs with speech as the preferred interface in India. This approach, together with its focus on local language assistance, tries to uniquely address the needs of the Indian market.

This necessitates altering the open models’ current design and giving them specialized training to teach the new language. The benefit is that compared to all current LLMs, the resulting models are more efficient (in terms of tokens consumed) for comprehending and producing Indian language, according to Raghavan.

About five months ago, Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar-both former employees of tech veteran Nandan Nilekani-backed AI4Bharat of IIT Madras-founded Sarvam. Raghavan also worked with UIDAI, the organization in charge of the widely used Aadhaar identity system in India, for more than ten years.

He remarked, “I personally have seen the tremendous benefit of innovating at the foundational layers and deploying at the population scale.” “We have an opportunity to reimagine how this technology can add value to people’s lives with the help of GenAI, as India has shown that it can harness technology differently.”

During the next few weeks, the business intends to release its first model to the public.

The Sarvam investment comes at a time when investors around the world are trying to find and support AI breakthroughs, banking on the idea that innovations in the field would boost productivity across a wide range of industries and that cutting-edge firms will generate returns that will last for generations.

In spite of having one of the biggest startup ecosystems globally, India has not yet had a significant influence in the quickly developing field of artificial intelligence. There are currently no native Indian competitors standing a chance against the might of major language model giants like Google’s Bard, Amazon-backed Anthropic, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. (In September, Nvidia and Indian giant Reliance announced their partnership, announcing plans to develop a massive language model trained on the variety of languages spoken in India.)

“Given its strategic importance, we see several countries making sovereign efforts to build GenAI models.” Vinod Khosla, the founder of Khosla Ventures, stated in a statement that “we need companies like Sarvam AI to develop deep expertise for building AI in and for India.” The first institutional investor in OpenAI was Khosla Ventures, which made a $5 billion profit on a $50 million investment.

Sarvam AI offers a “unique approach” to combining model research and application development to create “population-scale” solutions for India, according to Hemant Mohapatra, a partner at Lightspeed. He went on, “Lightspeed will be close partners and contribute with our global platform’s learnings and deep capital stack.”

Lightspeed and Peak XV An individual with close knowledge of the proceedings claims that India completed its investment in Sarvam AI’s seed funding round in less than a week.

Peak XV managing director Harshjit Sethi said in a statement that the Sarvam AI team, lead by Vivek and Pratyush, is one of the best AI teams to come out of India.

Together with Pratyush’s domain knowledge in AI, Vivek’s experience in developing large-scale systems places them in a unique position to develop AI applications for a broad audience. We think the Sarvam team is best positioned to achieve this. Broadly implementing AI in India would involve not only developing use cases that are specifically Indian but also providing them at costs that everyone can pay.