Sarvam AI, a homegrown startup in the generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) segment, said Thursday it has raised $41 million (about Rs 340 crore) in its Series A funding round led by venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Peak XV Partners, erstwhile Sequoia India and Southeast Asia, as well as Khosla Ventures participated in the round.
Sarvam AI plans to use the funds to develop a full-stack for generative AI, ranging from research-led innovations in training custom AI models to an enterprise-grade platform for authoring and deployment.
This full-stack approach will accelerate the adoption of GenAI in India, especially given that enterprises see the potential of GenAI but are grappling with how to leverage it for their business, Sarvam AI said in a statement.
“Lightspeed will be close partners and contribute with our deep capital stack and learnings from our global platform," said Hemant Mohapatra, partner at Lightspeed.
Sarvam AI was founded earlier this year by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, who previously worked on developing AI models for speech recognition and translation at AI4Bharat.
The company focuses on India’s needs, including training AI models to support the diverse set of Indian languages and voice-first interfaces. It will also work with Indian enterprises to co-build domain-specific AI models on their data. It is also aiming to create population-scale impact by layering GenAI on top of the India stack specifically for applications built for the public good.
“Large-scale adoption of AI in India will require not only building uniquely Indian use cases but also delivering them at prices that everyone can afford and we believe the Sarvam team is best positioned to accomplish this,” said Harshjit Sethi, managing director, Peak XV.