For decades, India has been the world’s back office for technology — building software for others, running systems designed elsewhere, consuming platforms created in Silicon Valley and Beijing. Sarvam AI co-founder Vivek Raghavan wants that era to end. Speaking at the India AI Summit 2026, he said plainly: “We have seen how we have only become the users of technology, not the creators of technology. Today, India is a different country. We can do this.”
What Sarvam Has Actually Built
Founded in August 2023 by Raghavan and co-founder Pratyush Kumar, both formerly of AI4Bharat at IIT Madras, Sarvam AI has built India’s first homegrown large language models. The company unveiled its 30B and 105B parameter models at the India AI Impact Summit in February 2026, trained on 18 trillion tokens with 10 to 20 per cent being Indian language data spanning all 22 official languages. Users can interact with Sarvam products entirely in their native tongue, including through feature phones, a detail Raghavan personally demonstrated to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The company has raised $41 million led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures participating. Multiple organisations have since approached Sarvam to build custom model versions deployable on local GPU infrastructure, keeping sensitive data fully within their own systems.
Sovereignty Over Dependence
Raghavan is direct about the larger stakes. Without domestic AI capability, India risks what he calls a new form of technological colonialism, shaped by decisions made entirely outside its borders. His co-founder Kumar frames it similarly: “As such an important country, we cannot not have our own laboratory with such an important technology.”
Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan called Sarvam’s launch a defining moment in India’s journey toward full-stack AI sovereignty.
