AI4Bharat Researchers To Raise $12 Mn From Peak XV, Lightspeed Venture To Set Up Own Startup

Researchers at India’s AI4Bharat are reportedly planning to raise $12 Mn from venture capitals Peak XV and Lightspeed Venture to launch an AI startup.

People aware of the matter informed that Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar who created AI models for speech recognition and translation at AI4Bharat, are going to launch their own venture called Sarvam to offer custom-made large language models (LLMs) for India centric use cases.

Reuters reported that the move comes after the India government backed AI4Bharat launched a mobile assistant enabled easy access system to the government schemes in multiple Indian languages. 

With the advent of generative AI, the use of AI in India has seen a boost. The government has been actively promoting AI application across functions and sectors. From education to information access, generative AI seems to be revolutionising every sector. 

Last month, commenting on this, Nandan Nilekani, non-executive chairman of Infosys said, “The combination of @ai4bharat with recent advances in generative AI and affordable phones, will enable a billion people to access the world’s knowledge and insights in voice interactions, in their own language. Now that is Inclusion!.”

However, the Indian government is also not ignoring the fact that too much AI application may cause threat to data security. Last month, MoS Rajeev Chandrasekhar stated that the government will regulate AI to ensure it does not harm “digital citizens”. 

This statement came right after Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI met Prime Minister Narendra Modi to discuss the opportunities which AI presents for India, the steps ahead, and global regulation needs around AI to prevent some of the downsides of the technology.

In India, AI-based startups have gained interest from many global players including tech giant Google.

Recently, Google announced 20 startups’ names under its accelerator programme which were selected on the basis of generative AI uses in the business process. It also announced that these startups will receive mentorship and support around AI/ML, cloud, UX, Android, web, product strategy, and growth for the next three months. 

Recently, some of the AI-based Indian startups that have bagged investment include ZuAI, WorkHack, Builder.AI, among others.  

Note: We at Inc42 take our ethics very seriously. More information about it can be found here.