Lightspeed-backed Artificial intelligence (AI) startup Sarvam AI has partnered with AI infrastructure provider Yotta to launch a suite of generative AI tools and models for both enterprises and developers. The launch follows a $41 million funding round secured last year.
The offerings include Sarvam Agents, Sarvam Models, and an API for developers, alongside open-source solutions.
The Sarvam 2B model is trained on Yotta, the firm's cofounder Vivek Raghavan told Moneycontrol in an interaction.
"Our solutions are going to be available on Yotta... The GPUs for Sarvam agents are running on Yotta. We could do with others as well but right now neither Azure nor AWS have H100 GPUs made for Indian businesses," Raghavan said.
Hiranandani-backed Yotta designs, builds and operates Tier III and IV data centers in India, which offer both colocation and hyperscale services and cloud and managed services.
According to an investor presentation by Carta, Yotta currently has 33 megawatts of live data centre capacity, with potential development of up to 890 megawatt in the future.
Yotta has tied up with global chipmaker Nvidia to offer high-performance computing capabilities from data centres in India for startups like Sarvam to develop their own AI services.
"We will host our offerings soon on GCP (Google Cloud Platform), we also will be announcing some partnership with Yotta and our models will be hosted on Yotta and Azure for now. Sarvam 2B model was trained on GPUs in India," Raghavan said.
As part of commercial offerings, the firm has launched Sarvam Agents for enterprises which is voice-enabled, multilingual, action-oriented, custom business agents deployable via telephone, WhatsApp, or in-app. Currently available in 10 Indian languages including Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Punjabi, Odia, Gujarati, Marathi, Kannada, and Bangla.
"If a human agent costs Rs 10 per minute, cost of these voice-agents starts at Rs. 1 / min. This is a big thing for enterprises," Raghavan added.
Sarvam has also launched India’s first foundational, open source, 2B small Indic LLM. It is the first LLM trained from scratch on an internal dataset of 4 trillion tokens, by an Indian company, with compute in India, with efficient representation for 10 Indian languages, Raghavan added.
The firm has also launched Shuka 1.0 which is India's first open-source AudioLM, an audio extension on the Llama 8B model to support Indian language voice in and text out, which is more accurate than frontier models.
It has also launched Sarvam Model for enterprises and developers as well a unique offering called A1, a gen AI tool for legal firms and lawyers.
Sarvam's commercial offerings will be used across sectors like BFSI, healthcare, legal tech and other enterprises.
Sarvam partners with Meta
Sarvam has also teamed up with Meta to offer a WhatsApp stack designed for enterprises, featuring use cases such as conversation history, business instructions, targeted marketing, and consumer feedback. The stack also enables enterprises to accept payments.
At the launch event in Bengaluru, the company said that WhatsApp boasts a reach of approximately 500 million users, with 20 million users transacting monthly.
Founded in July 2023 by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, who previously worked at Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani-backed AI4Bharat, Sarvam develops a full-stack offering for Generative AI, ranging from research-led innovations in training custom AI models to an enterprise-grade platform for authoring and deployment.
Sarvam AI raised $41 million in its Series A funding round led by Lightspeed Ventures with participation from Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures in December 2023.
While Open AI's GPT 4 and 5 uses bigger models, Sarvam's Raghavan said that the startup focusses on smaller models that are suited for specific tasks and are more effective in giving results.
"Those bigger models are definitely very useful. But if there is a use case for million times a day it won't be as effective and cost competitive, it won't have the same latency and causes global warming in turn. That is where Sarvam's models come to play, " he told Moneycontrol.
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