India's Sarvam AI Is All The Rage - Meet The 2 Enginners Behind It

Bengaluru-based startup Sarvam AI is making waves online after claiming that its latest artificial intelligence models have outperformed global heavyweights Google Gemini and OpenAI's ChatGPT.

The company introduced two new products, Sarvam Vision, an OCR and visual understanding tool, and Bulbul V3, a text-to-speech model. The products are designed to handle multiple Indian languages and accents with higher accuracy.

Brains behind Sarvam AI

Sarvam AI was founded by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar in August 2023.

Who is Vivek Raghavan?

Vivek Raghavan is an IIT Delhi graduate. He completed his BTech in 1989 and then went on to pursue a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in the US, finishing in 1993. According to his LinkedIn profile, he spent nearly two decades in the field of Electronic Design Automation (EDA) and founded two EDA companies.

He has also held senior management positions at Magma Design Automation, Synopsys and Avant! Corporation. In 2010, he took on the role of Chief Biometric Architect (volunteer) for the Aadhaar programme, where he helped shape the biometric systems.

Over the next 11 years and 8 months at UIDAI, he continued to serve as a Technology Advisor (volunteer). Between July 2013 and February 2022, he worked as Chief Project Manager and Biometric Architect (volunteer) where he was responsible for the design, implementation and scale-out of the technology platform for Aadhaar. He was later promoted to the role of an Advisor, pioneering the use of AI at Aadhaar to improve the quality of services and detect identity fraud.

Vivek has also served as volunteer CTO of Team Indus, India's entry to the Google Lunar X-Prize, which aimed to land a spacecraft on the surface of the moon. Along with this, he was a member of the AI committee of the Supreme Court of India, where he was responsible for the rollout of SUVAS (Supreme Court Vidhik Anuvaad Software) for translating judgments and orders into Indian languages. He has also worked on AI models for Fraud Detection in GSTN and has advised the National Payment Corporation of India.

Later, as Chief AI Evangelist at the EkStep Foundation, he worked closely with government and policy stakeholders on language technology. In this role, he served as an advisor to Digital India's Bhashini initiative, which aims to make available all services and information to citizens in their local language. He also served as Chief Mentor at the Nilekani Center at AI4Bharat, IIT Madras.

All About Pratyush Kumar

Pratyush completed his BTech in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from IIT Bombay in 2009, followed by a PhD in Computer Engineering in 2014, according to his LinkedIn profile.

After completing his PhD, he joined IBM as a Research Scientist in 2015 and worked on advanced research in computer engineering and AI-related fields. In 2019, co-founded One Fourth Labs, which specialises in providing education and consulting services in AI. He continued in this role until 2021.

He served as a faculty member at IIT Madras from 2018 to 2021 and continues to be associated with the institute as an Adjunct Faculty. He was also a part of Microsoft as a researcher for two years.

He co-founded AI4Bharat, which develops AI tools for Indian languages, and also helped launch PadhAI, an online platform aimed at making quality education more affordable and accessible.