Sarvam AI, Emergent Labs, Neysa And C2i: Emerging Stars Of Indian AI Ecosystem

With the biggest names in artificial intelligence (AI) like Sam Altman (OpenAI ), Dario Amodei (Anthropic) and Alexander Wang (Meta) descending to New Delhi on Thursday (Feb 19) to attend the AI Summit 2026, India has positioned itself as a key global voice in the fast-evolving technology landscape. While the Silicon Valley giants currently dominate the AI race, India has begun its charge with small but steadfast steps.

Sarvam AI: India's DeepSeek Moment

Bengaluru-based Sarvam AI has unveiled its flagship large language models, Sarvam-30B and Sarvam-105B, marking a significant milestone in India's push for sovereign AI. Built from the ground up without external data dependencies, these models are designed to bring high-performance reasoning and multilingual support to the masses.

By optimising for low-resource languages and voice-first interfaces, Sarvam AI is targeting the next billion users who have been largely sidelined by English-centric models.

"We are actually world-class in this," said Pratyush Kumar, CEO and co-founder of Sarvam AI at NDTV Ind.AI Summit.

In what is being dubbed as India's DeepSeek moment, Sarvam's Vision model scored about 84.3 per cent accuracy, ahead of Gemini 3 Pro at roughly 80.2 per cent and a ChatGPT vision model at around 69 to 70 per cent on olmOCR Bench.

On OmniDocBench v1.5, Sarvam Vision posted 93.28 per cent accuracy, again leading competing OCR systems. In word accuracy tests, it recorded 87.36 per cent, compared with 82.51 per cent for Gemini 3 Pro. The model also outperformed DeepSeek-R1, a 600B parameter model that was released a year ago, on the majority of benchmarks.

Emergent Labs: $100M 'Vibe Coding' Phenomenon

Capitalising on the 'vibe coding' phenomenon, Indian startup Emergent Labs has reached a landmark $100 million annual run-rate revenue (ARR) in just eight months. Co-founded by identical twin brothers Mukund and Madhav Jha from Bihar, the platform has become a powerhouse for non-technical creators since its May 2025 public launch.

By automating UI, backend, and deployment through natural language, the company's explosive growth has led experts to suggest it may soon challenge tech giants like Google and Meta in the global AI race.

"Considerably, we have been staying ahead in the field. Every time an application gets built on a platform, our agent self improve. We have a high-intensity, small but super strong engineering research team, and we ship really fast," Mukund told NDTV.

Neysa: Building AI Capabilities

On Monday (Feb 16), Neysa, a fast-growing AI acceleration cloud platform based in India that offers solutions to enterprises and government entities, secured backing from Blackstone to scale domestic compute capacity. The Mumbai-headquartered startup will be scaling domestic compute capacity amid India's push to build homegrown AI capabilities.

The US private equity firm, alongside its co-investors (Teachers' Venture Growth, TVS Capital, 360 ONE Asset, and Nexus Venture Partners), has agreed to invest up to $600 million of equity in Neysa. Founded in 2023, the company is also planning to raise an additional $600 million in debt financing as it plans to scale up and deploy over 20,000 GPUs in India.

C2i: Engineering Power

With demand for AI increasing, power is fast becoming the limiting factor in scaling AI data centres. However, a Bengaluru-based startup named C2i (which stands for control conversion and intelligence) is ensuring that India does not lag in the domain. The startup raised $15 million in a Series A round led by Peak XV Partners, bringing the two-year-old startup's total funding to $19 million, according to a report in The Economic Times.

The Indian company is building plug-and-play, system-level power solutions designed to cut energy losses and improve the economics of large-scale AI infrastructure.

With Indian startups proving they can compete in the big leagues, the Indian government has also earmarked $1.1 billion for its state-backed venture capital programme. The fund will invest in AI and advanced manufacturing startups across the country.