The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.

By Ujjaini Dutta

BENGALURU, March 13 (Reuters Breakingviews) - India's domestic artificial intelligence push has an unlikely torchbearer: Sarvam. The little known two-and-a-half year startup, backed by Peak XV Partners, unveiled two large Indic language models at last month's AI Impact Summit to much fanfare. But in a market dominated by OpenAI and peers, the homegrown challenger expands India’s options rather than tilt the balance away from global giants.

The Bengaluru-based company has so far raised over $50 million from venture capital heavyweights including Lightspeed Ventures and Khosla Ventures at a valuation of about $200 million, Bloomberg reported. The team of 15, led by co-founders Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, also has government backing: in April last year, it secured access to over 4,000 Nvidia NVDA.O processors, alongside $11 million in state subsidies, as part of New Delhi's IndiaAI Mission to develop a domestic AI industry.

By any measure, Sarvam is a minnow next to OpenAI, Anthropic and rivals. But that may not matter much for its goal of bringing domestic AI to billions of Indians. To that end, the company's models, trained from scratch, are accessible through 22 Indian languages and are customised for voice commands - a key feature for a country where many can't type out English prompts. "Sovereignty matters much more in AI than building the biggest models," Raghavan declared at the AI summit.

Early wins could come from government contracts. The startup is already partnering with two Indian states, for example, including Tamil Nadu, in building a "Sovereign AI Research Park". More public sector projects are probably in the works: New Delhi's growing anxiety of becoming too dependent on American and Chinese technology puts Sarvam and compatriots in an ideal position.

Still, Sarvam's prospects will probably depend on winning over the private sector too. In the fiscal year to March 2025, the startup made a net loss of $11 million on just $3.1 million of revenue, filings on market intelligence firm Tracxn showed. It's a market where Sarvam faces stiff competition against deep-pocketed global firms. Anthropic, which opened its Bengaluru office just last month, has seen its revenue run-rate in India double in four months, underscoring the popularity of its Claude coding tool. Even France's Mistral AI will soon open its first office in India and says its models are able to accommodate Hindi, Punjabi and other languages. Against this backdrop, Sarvam is perhaps necessary for India's AI push, but not yet the local hero.

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CONTEXT NEWS

Bengaluru-based AI startup Sarvam at the India AI Impact Summit on February 18 unveiled large language models including 30-billion- and 105-billion-parameter models; a text-to-speech model, a speech-to-text model, and a vision model to parse documents.

(Editing by Robyn Mak; Production by Aditya Srivastav)

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