According to Yahoo News, Sarvam AI, a generative artificial intelligence startup focusing on the Indian market, has raised $41 million in a Series A funding round. This marks the largest funding round for an early-stage AI company in India. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the funding round, with participation from Vinod Khosla's Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners, formerly Sequoia Capital India & Southeast Asia.
Sarvam AI, based in Bangalore, was co-founded by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar. The startup aims to build large language models for unique applications in Indian languages, making apps accessible and affordable for India's 1.4 billion population. Sarvam AI plans to develop open-source foundational AI systems and tools for creating apps that cater to the limited compute infrastructure available to developers in India.
The company's first open-source model, which will work in the top 10 Indian languages, is set to be released in the coming weeks. It will be available for trials by developers, startups, enterprises, and government-owned entities. Sarvam AI's systems will be smaller in scale, with billions of parameters, compared to the trillions of parameters in larger models. The startup's name, Sarvam, is derived from the ancient Sanskrit word meaning 'all,' reflecting its inclusive mission.