Sarvam AI’s full-stack GenAI platform comprises multiple products — Sarvam Agents, Sarvam 2B, Shuka 1.0, Sarvam Models, and A1
The cost of Sarvam Agents starts at INR 1 per minute and the startup has already deployed these agents for some companies
Sarvam AI said Sarvam 2B is India’s first foundational, open-source, Indic SLM which can perform tasks like translation and summarisation in vernacular languages
Bengaluru-based GenAI startup Sarvam AI
has launched its full-stack GenAI platform comprising multiple products — Sarvam Agents, Sarvam 2B, Shuka 1.0, Sarvam Models, and A1.
With its diverse products, Sarvam AI aims to revolutionise AI accessibility and adoption across India’s diverse linguistic and socio-economic landscape.
Speaking to Inc42, Sarvam AI cofounder Vivek Raghavan said, “Our end goal is to enable a billion Indians to access GenAI.”
He said that companies in the GenAI ecosystem are largely operating in three different areas – building foundational models, fine-turning models, or working at a prompt level. While most companies select either of these three, Sarvam AI wants to have a presence across all three layers, said Raghavan.
Here’s a quick view of Sarvam AI’s five products and their capabilities:
Sarvam Agents: These are voice-enabled, action-oriented, custom business agents. Currently, these are available in 10 languages, including Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Odia, Gujarati, Kannada, and Bengali. These agents are deployable via telephone, WhatsApp, and in-app.
The cost of these voice agents starts at INR 1 per minute. Sarvam AI has already deployed these agents for some companies, while it’s in talks for more B2B partnerships. From customer service to outbound sales calls, enterprises can use these agents for multiple use cases.
Sarvam 2B: The startup claims that this product is India’s first foundational, open-source, Indic small language model (SLM). Trained with 4 Tn tokens, Sarvam 2B can perform tasks like translation and summarisation in vernacular languages.
Raghavan said that Sarvam 2B will be better at Indian language tasks than international models like Meta’s Llama.
Shuka 1.0: Sarvam AI is also an open-source model, which the startup claims is the country’s first open-source audioLM. Shuka 1.0 is an audio extension on the Llama 8B model that would support Indian language voice in and text out. The startup claims it is more accurate and less cost-intensive than the frontier models.
Sarvam Models: Via this product, the startup is making the Indic models, used in the creation of Sarvam Agents, available for use as APIs. It includes models for translation, speech recognition, speech synthesis, and document parsing.
A1: This product is particularly designed for lawyers. It’s a GenAI workbench designed to enhance lawyers’ capabilities with features such as regulatory chat, document drafting, redaction and data extraction. A1 also has tools for the drafting of contracts and share purchase agreements, among others.
Commenting on the product launch, Hemant Mohapatra, partner at Lightspeed, one of the investors in Sarvam AI, said, “In a huge and diverse country like India, multi-lingual AI holds the potential to not only bridge the digital divide, but also unlock transformative use cases for ‘Bharat’. We are committed to support the team and applaud them for their mission of driving meaningful impact for billions of Indians.”
The Story Of Sarvam AI
Founded in July 2023 by AI4Bharat creators, Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, Sarvam AI has been building India-focussed GenAI foundational models and applications in an attempt to enhance the performance and cost-effectiveness of generative AI applications in India.
Sarvam AI’s five products are based on this thesis.
Raghavan said, “There are four main ideas in our thesis – the first is that GenAI in India needs to be in voice in the language of the people. The second idea is that this technology is not for chatting with people but for getting things done.”
“The third is while there are the likes of Open AI and Anthropic building frontier models, which are excellent, but when it comes to using these models on a day-to-day basis for domain-specific actions, they are expensive and inaccurate. That’s when Sarvam AI is building small language models (SLMs) for specific use cases that are more cost-effective, less latent with better output. The last idea is to enable sovereignty,” he added.
So far, it was expected that Sarvam AI was building large language models and would compete with Ola’s Krutrim AI and international majors like Meta, OpenAI, and Google. However, with its entry into the application layer of GenAI, Sarvam AI will face major competition in the GenAI startup ecosystem in India.
Sarvam Agents, Sarvam Models, and AI will be the source of the startup’s revenue in the coming years.
The startup raised $41 Mn (around INR 342 Cr) in its Series A funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, in participation with Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures in December last year. It has been the largest fundraise by an Indian AI startup so far.
Sarvam AI declined to comment on its current revenue figures.
Speaking on its fundraising plans, Raghavan said that the company is “reasonably frugal” in its approach but GenAI is a cost-intensive business. However, he did not share any immediate fundraising plans.
As per Inc42’s report, GenAI market in India is set to grow exponentially to surpass $17 Bn mark by 2030 from $1.1 Bn in 2023, growing at a CAGR of 48%.
