Sarvam AI Founder's Journey: From ETH PhD to Building Indian-Language LLMs
itsOmSarraf_ · x · 2026-10-02
A viral X thread traces the career of Sarvam AI co-founder Pratyush Kumar: IIT Bombay grad, PhD at ETH Zurich, research scientist at IBM and Microsoft Research — where he noticed AI breaking down in Hindi, Tamil and Bengali. He returned to IIT Madras, co-founded the open-source AI4Bharat project and PadhAI, publishing 89+ papers along the way. In August 2023, against the prevailing advice that India should just use American models, he and Vivek Raghavan (architect of Aadhaar) founded Sarvam AI in Bengaluru, raising $41M within five months. A representative story of India's push for sovereign, native-language AI models.
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