IIT Bombay registers BharatGen as a non-profit, consortium remains active

IIT Bombay

BharatGen, a consortium of research and engineering institutions anchored by IIT Bombay has registered with the Registrar of Companies (ROC) as a non-profit organisation, said Rishi Bal, executive vice president at BharatGen.

The company was registered in November under IIT Bombay’s address in Powai, Mumbai making it the owner of the firm. Bal told Moneycontrol that consortium would remain active with all the existing partners including IIT Madras, IIIT Hyderabad, IIT Kanpur, IIT Hyderabad, IIT Mandi, IIM Indore, IIT Kharagpur and IIIT Delhi.

“BharatGen has been registered under Section-8 of RoC, and the consortium very much continues to hold. We have also added IIT Kharagpur and IIIT Delhi to it,” Bal said.

He added, “We will have an independent board of directors, and the names of whom we will announce publicly soon. We want to grow the firm now, and we will be raising new round of funds too.”

BharatGen was recently awarded more than Rs 900 crore under the IndiaAI Mission to build a 1-trillion parameter large language model (LLM). The firm has set a goal to distill the LLM into smaller, domain-specific systems for sectors like law, agriculture, and finance.

In its initial phase, the LLM was built on an investment of less than Rs 235 crores by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) of the Government of India, through cost-effective compute.