Sarvam AI, a Chennai-headquartered startup founded in July and developing its own generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) models, said it has raised $41 million in a Series A round of funding, according to ETtech report.
This first round of funding was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The other investors are Peak XV, formerly Sequoia India and Southeast Asia, and Khosla Ventures, one of OpenAI’s early investors, as per a statement from Sarvam AI.
The development represents the largest raise at this stage for an India-based artificial intelligence startup. “We are building training models. In the next few weeks, we will be announcing our first model, which is being trained for Indian languages,” cofounder Vivek Raghavan told ET.
“Our focus is to make generative AI relevant to India. We are solving that in ways that can add value to the country. Some of the larger models that people are talking about are going towards artificial general intelligence, that is not really our focus,” he said.
Raghavan added that one of the theses that the company is exploring is how a large percentage of the value in Gen AI is derived from domain-specific models. Here, there is scope for smarter, smaller and more or equally efficient models to perform tasks, he said.
Raghavan’s cofounder Pratyush Kumar is also a founder of a research initiative on open-source Indian language AI, called AI4Bharat, at the IIT Madras campus, where Sarvam AI’s office is housed. The duo plans to expand to an office in Bengaluru as well, Raghavan told ET.
Kumar was previously also a researcher at firms such as IBM and Microsoft, and also part of the faculty at IIT Madras. The overall team of 18 professionals, comprising four doctorates and about 5 people who have built deep learning AI models in the past, are predominantly IIT Madras graduates, Raghavan said.
“We see several countries having sovereign efforts to build GenAI models given its strategic importance. We need companies like Sarvam AI to develop deep expertise to build AI in and for India,” said Vinod Khosla, the founder of Khosla Ventures.
“Having backed some of the most influential names in GenAI globally, we are excited by Sarvam AI’s unique approach in combining model innovation and application development to build population-scale solutions for India,” said Hemant Mohapatra, partner, Lightspeed.
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