Meet the minds behind Sarvam AI: How Pratyush Kumar and Vivek Raghavan are building India’s sovereign AI stack

Bengaluru-based artificial intelligence (AI) startup Sarvam AI has rapidly emerged as one of the most talked-about names in India’s AI ecosystem, with its latest models sparking comparisons with global heavyweights such as Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

As part of a high-profile 14-day launch streak, Sarvam has rolled out multiple models and products, including Bulbul V3, Sarvam Arya and Sarvam Vision. Backed by venture capital firms Lightspeed Venture Partners and Peak XV Partners, Sarvam AI is betting on an India-first strategy, combining multilingual intelligence, sovereign data approaches and enterprise-ready deployment to take on global AI players.

The spotlight, however, is firmly on the two founders driving the company’s India-first AI ambition, CEO Pratyush Kumar and co-founder Vivek Raghavan.

Pratyush Kumar: From academia to sovereign AI

Pratyush Kumar currently serves as the Chief Executive Officer of Sarvam AI, leading product development, research and overall strategy. An alumnus of IIT Bombay, Kumar holds a BTech in electrical and electronics engineering, followed by a PhD in computer engineering.

His career spans deep research roles at IBM and Microsoft, along with academic stints at IIT Madras, where he also served as a faculty member. Before founding Sarvam AI in August 2023, Kumar co-founded AI-focused ventures One Fourth Labs and AI4Bharat, both aimed at advancing Indian-language and applied AI research.

At Sarvam, Kumar is now focused on building large-scale, multilingual AI systems designed specifically for Indian use cases, with an emphasis on reliability, governance and enterprise adoption.

Vivek Raghavan: Policy, platforms and population-scale tech

Co-founder Vivek Raghavan brings a blend of deep tech and public digital infrastructure experience. A graduate of IIT Delhi, Raghavan went on to earn a PhD in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.

Professionally, he began his career as a vice president at Magma Design Automation. Over the years, he has also played a significant role in India’s digital public infrastructure journey, volunteering with the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) on Aadhaar’s biometric systems for nearly 12 years. His work has also extended to EkStep Foundation and Khosla Labs, where he contributed to large-scale digital platforms.

Building India’s AI backbone

Sarvam AI has gained fresh attention following the performance of Sarvam Vision, which the company claims has outperformed leading global models in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) benchmarks, particularly for Indian-language documents.

The startup is also a key participant in the IndiaAI Mission, where it is developing what is positioned as India’s first sovereign, multilingual foundational large language model tailored for Indian languages and enterprise needs.