Pratyush Kumar: The AI visionary building India's own ChatGPT
Pratyush Kumar is shaking up India's AI scene. As co-founder of Sarvam AI, he's leading the charge to build powerful language models tailored for India.
The government picked his startup to develop the country's first sovereign large language model as part of the IndiaAI Mission.
Kumar's impressive background and experience
Kumar holds a Ph.D. from ETH Zurich and a B.Tech from IIT Bombay.
He's worked at Microsoft Research and IBM Research, taught at IIT Madras, and started projects like AI4Bharat (for Indian language tech) and PadhAI (affordable online learning).
Sarvam AI's mission and achievements
Sarvam AI is focused on making advanced tech accessible in Indian languages—a challenge global giants have struggled with.
Their Sarvam Vision tool beat out Gemini 3 Pro and ChatGPT on Indian-language OCR tasks, while Bulbul V3 already offers text-to-speech in 11 languages (with plans for more).
Sarvam-M and funding
Sarvam launched Sarvam-M—a massive open-source model tuned for math, coding, and 10 Indian languages.
Backed by tens of millions in funding so far, they're also serious about privacy: no sensitive data like Aadhaar is used in training their models.