Sarvam-1

Sarvam-1, launched in late 2024 by Bengaluru-based Sarvam AI, is the first open-source LLM purpose-built for Indian languages. It's a small language model (under 10 billion parameters) supporting ten Indian languages — Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu — plus English, optimized for production deployment with 4-6x faster inference than conventional LLMs of comparable capability.

Sarvam AI was selected by the Government of India under the IndiaAI Mission (April 2025) to build the country's sovereign 120-billion-parameter open-source foundation model for governance and public services — a project distinct from Sarvam-1 itself, which remains the practical open model available today. The company has raised around $50 million from Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed, and Peak XV. Note: exact launch day within October 2024 is approximate in public reporting.