Meet the minds behind Sarvam AI: How Pratyush Kumar and Vivek Raghavan are building India’s sovereign AI stack

Sarvam AI, a burgeoning artificial intelligence startup based in Bengaluru, is quickly becoming a significant player in India's AI landscape. The company has garnered attention with its innovative models, which are being likened to those of global giants like Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Recently, Sarvam AI embarked on an ambitious 14-day launch spree, unveiling several products including Bulbul V3, Sarvam Arya, and Sarvam Vision. Backed by prominent venture capital firms such as Lightspeed Venture Partners and Peak XV Partners, Sarvam AI is adopting a unique India-first strategy. This approach emphasizes multilingual capabilities, sovereign data management, and solutions designed for enterprise deployment, all aimed at competing with established international AI firms. At the forefront of this initiative are the co-founders, CEO Pratyush Kumar and Vivek Raghavan, both of whom are committed to advancing India’s AI capabilities. Pratyush Kumar, an IIT Bombay alumnus with a BTech in electrical and electronics engineering and a PhD in computer engineering, leads the company's product development and strategic vision. His impressive background includes research roles at IBM and Microsoft, as well as faculty positions at IIT Madras. Before establishing Sarvam AI in August 2023, he co-founded AI-focused initiatives such as One Fourth Labs and AI4Bharat, dedicated to enhancing Indian-language and applied AI research. Vivek Raghavan, the co-founder, complements Kumar's vision with his extensive expertise in technology and digital infrastructure. A graduate of IIT Delhi with a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, Raghavan has a rich history in the tech industry, including a position as vice president at Magma Design Automation. His significant contributions to India’s digital public infrastructure, particularly during his 12-year involvement with the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) on Aadhaar’s biometric systems, highlight his dedication to scalable tech solutions. Recently, Sarvam AI has captured attention with the performance of Sarvam Vision, which reportedly surpasses leading global models in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) benchmarks for Indian-language documents. The startup is also actively involved in the IndiaAI Mission, where it is working on what is anticipated to be India’s first sovereign, multilingual foundational large language model tailored to meet the needs of Indian languages and enterprises.