An Evening with Sarvam: Building for the Next 1.4B Users
For decades, the most ambitious AI research happened in a handful of cities - San Francisco, London, Seattle. India sent many of its best researchers there.
Sarvam is changing that.
In less than three years, they've built India's foundational AI infrastructure from scratch - a 2 trillion token Indic pretraining corpus, tokenizers that run at 3x the efficiency of multilingual models from Google and Meta, and a 105B parameter model that competes directly with OpenAI and Qwen on reasoning benchmarks - all without copying the US lab playbook.
In this closed-door evening, Hemant Mohapatra and Dev Khare from Lightspeed will sit down with Pratyush Kumar, co-founder of Sarvam, for a conversation with researchers around a central question: is there world-class work to do in India right now?
They'll get specific: what Sarvam is building, where the open problems are, and what it looks like to work on challenges shaped by extreme diversity in language, literacy, and context - at scale.
Space is limited, please RSVP.
About Lightspeed:
Lightspeed is a global multi-stage venture capital firm focused on accelerating disruptive innovations in Enterprise, Consumer, Health, and Fintech sectors.
Over the past two decades, Lightspeed has backed hundreds of entrepreneurs and helped build more than 500 companies globally, including Anthropic, Mistral, Pika, Suno, Emergent, Sarvam, Zepto, Nutanix, Razorpay, and OYO.
The firm manages over $40B in AUM, with teams across the U.S., Europe, India, Israel, and Southeast Asia.
About Sarvam:
Sarvam AI is building the bedrock of sovereign AI for India through a full-stack generative AI platform spanning foundational models, voice AI, and developer infrastructure.
Designed to power AI agents and applications at population scale, Sarvam’s models are built with a deep understanding of India’s linguistic and cultural diversity.
Founded by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, Sarvam is backed by leading investors including Lightspeed, Peak XV Partners, and Khosla Ventures.