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Sarvam AI has unveiled an artificial-intelligence model that's more tailored for India than the likes of ChatGPT and Claude.
The Bengaluru-based AI startup announced two models at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi—a showcase for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s efforts to make his country a leading player in the emerging technology. Sarvam’s models are built to be used through voice commands and are accessible through 22 Indian languages, which the company says will be a competitive advantage in the country of 1.45 billion where the vast majority can’t read, write or type in English.
“Today we show we can bring our own AI to a billion Indians,” said Sarvam co-founder Pratyush Kumar during an event in Delhi.
Sarvam also offers what’s known as Agentic AI models that can carry out tasks like coding or meeting planning in large part autonomously and with minimal human intervention. The company says its agents could drive enterprise automation in one of the world’s fastest growing economies.
The startup’s unveiling of India-specific models trained from scratch comes as the AI race between the US and China is intensifying. The government is funding AI accelerators and pushing model makers to launch services so the country, one of the largest reservoirs globally of technical talent, isn’t left behind.
Sarvam has steep challenges in fending off global competitors. The startup has received more than $50 million in funding, including from Lightspeed Ventures LLC and Khosla Ventures, and was last valued at about $200 million. That’s tiny compared with Silicon Valley leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic PBC, last valued at $500 billion and $380 billion, respectively. It’s also small next to companies like Mistral AI, a French pioneer in the technology that is valued at $13.25 billion and is expanding in India with local languages.
Sarvam touts its India-first approach and the security it offers by running its AI models from inside the country. The startup’s models are trained on trillions of Indian data sets, particularly those in Indian languages, making it suitable for real-time deployment at scale in the world’s most populous country not just in local languages but also mixed languages such as Hinglish.
In recent benchmark tests, the startup said its models performed with superior accuracy on tasks like optical character recognition for Indian scripts. The Sarvam vision model achieved an accuracy of over 84% on document intelligence tasks, eclipsing global models hundreds of times larger in size.
“Sovereignty matters much more in AI than building the biggest models,” said Sarvam’s other co-founder, Vivek Raghavan, at the same event.
India is hosting dozens of leading global chief executives, AI founders, country leaders, researchers and policy experts this week as it attempts to position itself as an alternative to the US and China, by leading in “democratising AI” and taking a cost-efficient, language-diverse route.
India’s digital infrastructure has relied on foreign technologies for decades so the launch of the Sarvam models is seen as a step toward developing a “sovereign AI” ecosystem within the country.
Indian AI startups like Sarvam and BharatGen, which also released a series of India-made models this week, are looking to export their AI systems to other developing economies in the world where neither Chinese nor US models are favoured.
English (US) ·