Sarvam AI secures $41M in Series A funding led by Lightspeed

Gen AI startup Sarvam AI has raised $41 million in Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partnersand supported by Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures.

The startup aims to focus on India’s unique needs, which includes training AI models to support the various Indian languages and voice-first interfaces. It also aims to work with Indian enterprises to co-build domain-specific AI models on their data.

Co-founded by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, Sarvam AI aims to develop the “full-stack” for Generative AI, which comprises research-led innovations in training custom AI models to enterprise-grade platforms for authoring and deployment. 

The company claims that this full-stack approach will push the adoption of generative AI in India, especially given that enterprises see the potential of the technology but are grappling with how to leverage it for their business. 

"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. Lightspeed will be close partners and contribute with our deep capital stack and learnings from our global platform," said Hemant Mohapatra, Partner, Lightspeed. 

"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 can reimagine how this technology can add value to people’s lives,” said Vivek Raghavan, Co-founder of Sarvam AI. 

The AI firm aims to create population-scale impact layering generative AI on top of the successful India stack, specific for public-good applications.

Vinod Khosla, a pioneer in Silicon Valley AI investments, including his early support for OpenAI, 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 for building AI in and for India."