Bengaluru-based AI startup Sarvam AI, just five months into its journey, has announced a $41 million in funding across its Seed and Series A financing rounds. The company aims to build a comprehensive suite of generative AI offerings.
Lightspeed, a prominent venture capital firm, led the Series A funding round, highlighting the industry’s confidence in Sarvam AI’s potential. In the Seed round, Lightspeed partnered with Peak XV Partners, another esteemed investment firm. Notably, Khosla Ventures also joined forces with Lightspeed to participate in the Series A funding.
Sarvam AI is currently focused on building large language models (LLMs) specifically tailored to support Indian languages. Vivek Raghavan, co-founder of Sarvam AI, explained that the startup is also creating a versatile platform enabling businesses to leverage these LLMs for a wide range of applications. This platform will empower businesses to develop apps, deploy them on popular channels, monitor logs, and perform custom evaluations, all with the assistance of Sarvam AI’s cutting-edge technology.
One of Sarvam AI’s initiatives involves building LLMs that utilize voice as the primary interface for Indian users. This strategic approach, combined with a strong commitment to supporting local languages, positions Sarvam AI to cater directly to the unique requirements of the Indian market.
To achieve this, the startup is redesigning existing open models and training them in custom ways to accommodate new languages effectively. This innovative approach results in models that are significantly more efficient in terms of token consumption for understanding and generating Indian languages compared to existing LLMs.
Sarvam AI was co-founded by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, both of whom have extensive experience in the AI field. They previously worked at AI4Bharat, an AI initiative backed by tech veteran Nandan Nilekani and IIT Madras. Raghavan brings over a decade of experience from his time at UIDAI, the organization responsible for India’s widespread identity system, Aadhaar.
Sarvam AI plans to make its first model publicly available in the coming weeks.
