Sarvam, an Indian AI firm, raises $41 million in investment in only five months

 Sarvam, an Indian AI firm, raises $41 million in investment in only five months

Emerging from stealth mode, Sarvam AI has revealed that it has received $41 million in its five-month-old Indian startup's rush to develop a full-stack generative AI product line.

The seed and Series A fundraising rounds are where the $41 million in money was raised. While Lightspeed and Peak XV Partners co-led the seed round, Lightspeed led the Series A round. Khosla Ventures and Peak XV also took part in the Series A investment.

The Bengaluru-based firm Sarvam AI, according to Vivek Raghavan of TechCrunch, is developing extensive language models to support Indian languages. In addition, he added, the organization is developing a platform that would enable companies to create LLM applications for "everything from writing an app, deploying it to popular channels, viewing logs, as well as custom assessments."

In India, Sarvam AI is likewise concentrating on developing LLMs using speech as the primary interface. The plan is especially designed to satisfy the demands of the Indian market, with a focus on promoting regional languages.

In order to do this, we must modify the open models' current design and educate them using unique techniques to teach the new language. The benefit is that compared to all current LLMs, the generated models are more efficient (in terms of tokens spent) at comprehending and producing Indian language, according to Raghavan.

About five months ago, Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, who were both employed at the IT behemoth Nandan Nilekani-backed AI4India at IIT Madras, created Sarvam. Raghavan worked for UIDAI, the organization in charge of Aadhaar, the widely used Indian identity system, for more than ten years.

He said, "I have personally witnessed the tremendous benefit of innovating at the foundational level and implementing at the population scale." "India has shown that it can use technology in different ways, and with the help of GenAI, we can envision new ways that this technology can improve people's lives."

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

The investment in Sarvam comes at a time when financiers across the world are scrambling to find and fund AI success stories, advancing the idea that technological advancements in AI will boost productivity across a wide range of sectors and position startups at the vanguard of generational wealth.

India's startup environment is among the biggest in the world, but it hasn't had much of an influence on the quickly expanding AI industry. There is currently no indigenous Indian competitor challenging the supremacy of large language model giants like as Google's Bard, Amazon-backed Anthropic, and OpenAI's ChatGPT. (In September, Nvidia and Indian behemoth Reliance announced their partnership, indicating ambitions to develop a bigger language model trained on India's variety of languages.)

"Considering its strategic significance, we see several nations putting forward independent attempts to develop GenAI models. "In order to build AI in India and for India, we need companies like Sarvam AI to develop deep expertise," Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla said in a statement. The first institutional investor in OpenAI was Khosla Ventures, which generated $5 billion in profits on a $50 million investment.

Sarvam AI offers a "unique approach" to combining model research with application development to deliver "population-level" solutions for India, according to Hemant Mohapatra, a partner at Lightspeed. He went on, "Lightspeed will be a close partner and contribute with our global platform's learnings and deep capital reserves."

As per an insider with intimate knowledge of the situation, it took less than a week for Lightspeed India and Peak XV to participate in Sarvam AI's first seed investment round.

The managing director of Peak XV, Harshjit Sethi, said in a statement that "the Sarvam AI team led by Vivek as well as Pratyush is one of the highest caliber AI teams to emerge in India."

"Vivek's proficiency in developing expansive systems, along with Pratyush's domain knowledge in artificial intelligence, places them in a unique position to develop AI applications for a large population." In order for AI to be widely adopted in India, it must be possible to create use cases that are specifically Indian while simultaneously making them affordable for everybody. We think the Sarvam team is well-positioned to do this. is in optimal shape for.