Pratyush Kumar, Co-Founder and CEO of Sarvam AI, spent more than fifteen years in research before building what has become one of India’s most prominent AI startups. Kumar holds a B.Tech in electrical engineering from IIT Bombay and a Ph.D. in computer engineering from ETH Zurich, and held research positions at Microsoft Research, IBM Research, and adjunct faculty roles at IIT Madras across his career.
Before founding Sarvam, Kumar co-founded AI4Bharat, a research initiative at IIT Madras dedicated to building open-source AI tools, datasets, and models specifically for Indian languages — work that later secured significant funding, including from the Nilekani family, to establish the Nilekani Centre for AI. He also co-built PadhAI, an affordable online learning platform that taught deep learning to tens of thousands of students across India between 2016 and 2023, often for as little as a small course fee.
In August 2023, Kumar co-founded Sarvam AI in Bengaluru alongside Dr. Vivek Raghavan, who brought experience building India’s large-scale digital public infrastructure, including contributions to Aadhaar, the country’s national biometric ID system. As CEO, Kumar has focused Sarvam on building a full-stack generative AI platform tailored to India’s linguistic diversity — spanning 22 official languages and numerous dialects — with an emphasis on affordable, efficient models suited to a cost-conscious market. Sarvam AI raised a combined seed and Series A round of roughly $41 million in December 2023, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures. The company has since become part of India’s sovereign large language model programme under the IndiaAI Mission, and reached unicorn status following a $234 million Series B round led by HCLTech in June 2026, valuing the company at $1.5 billion. Products including Sarvam Vision OCR and its Bulbul text-to-speech system have been reported to outperform international competitors like ChatGPT and Google Gemini on certain Indian-language benchmarks — a milestone Kumar has framed as central to India’s push toward AI independence.
