AI4Bharat researchers to raise $12 mn

AI4Bharat, an initiative of IIT Madras based startup backed by Microsoft, are raising $12 million in a funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Peak XV.

Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar will reportedly start a venture named Sarvam to develop custom-made large language models for India-centric use cases. AI4Bharat is backed by Microsoft and NVIDIA.

The custom-made large language models (LLMs) for India-centric use cases. It has already developed a model called Sarvam, which can be used for a variety of tasks, including speech recognition and translation.

The funding will be used to expand AI4Bharat's research and development efforts, and to grow its team. The company is also looking to expand its reach to other markets in Asia.

AI4Bharat is one of a number of startups that are working on developing LLMs for India. Other companies in this space include Inscripta, which is developing a model called IndicBERT, and Rasa, which is developing a model called Rasa NLU.

The development of LLMs is a rapidly growing field, and there is a lot of potential for these models to be used in a variety of applications. AI4Bharat is well-positioned to take advantage of this growth, and the funding will help the company to accelerate its development efforts.

Going forward, the development of LLMs for India-centric use cases has the potential to improve the quality of life for Indians and to boost the Indian economy.