Sarvam AI raises $41 Mn from Lightspeed, Peak XV and Khosla Ventures

Generative AI startup Sarvam AI has announced that it is raising $41 million in a Series A round led by Lightspeed and with participation from Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures.

Sarvam AI will focus on India’s unique needs including training AI models to support the diverse set of Indian languages and voice-first interfaces, the company said in a press release. It will also work with Indian enterprises to co-build domain-specific AI models on their data.

Launched by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, Sarvam AI is planning to develop the full-stack for Generative AI ranging from research-led innovations in training custom AI models to an enterprise-grade platform for authoring and deployment. As per the company, the full-stack approach will accelerate adoption of GenAI in India, especially given that enterprises see the potential of GenAI but are grappling with how to leverage it for their business.

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"I have seen first hand the enormous value in innovating at foundational layers and deploying at population scale. India has demonstrated that it can harness technology differently, and with GenAI we have an opportunity to reimagine how this technology can add value to people’s lives,” said Raghavan.

Raghavan has a decade-long experience in building digital public infrastructure, including Aadhaar. The duo had earlier worked on developing AI models for speech recognition and translation at AI4Bharat. In June, AI4Bharat unveiled a mobile assistant that aims to make information on government schemes accessible in multiple languages.

A bunch of generative AI startups have managed to raise early funding round in the past 12 months. The list includes OnFinance.ai, Hexo, and another Peak XV Partners-backed company Gan.ai.

In September, Jio Platforms partnered with global chipmaker NVIDIA to build cloud-based AI infrastructure in the country. According to NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang, Reliance can build its own large language models that power generative AI applications made in India.