IndiaAI Mission Releases 3 Indigenous AI Models Developed by Soket, ZenteiQ

The IndiaAI Mission has released three indigenous foundation models: EKA-1 by Soket AI Labs and Dhīr 2B and Dhīr 5B by ZenteiQ AiTech Innovations.

EKA-1 is a 26.3-billion-parameter model trained on approximately 7.5 trillion tokens. It supports all 22 scheduled Indian languages and English, with capabilities in mathematics, coding, reasoning and agentic applications. 

Meanwhile, ZenteiQ’s Dhīr models are open-source multilingual assistants built for on-premise and offline deployment across government, defence, industrial and educational sectors.

The models were unveiled at an event in New Delhi on November 3 in the presence of S Krishnan, Secretary at the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), and senior officials from MeitY and IndiaAI.

Soket AI Labs developed EKA-1 as an open, sparse hybrid language model. The company said the model was tailored to India's banking, financial services and cybersecurity sectors.

“With the support of the IndiaAI Mission, we have developed an advanced AI model specifically tailored to India's unique banking, financial services and cybersecurity landscape. It is designed to address sector-specific requirements, understand India's evolving digital ecosystem, and deliver solutions aligned with the country's needs and priorities,” said Abhishek Upperwal, CEO of Soket AI Labs.

ZenteiQ, meanwhile, introduced Dhīr 2B and Dhīr 5B as open-source models supporting English and 10 Indian languages. The models are built for document-based automation, information retrieval and citizen and enterprise services. They can be deployed on-premise and operate without continuous cloud connectivity.

The company said the models could run across different computing platforms, including GPUs and TPUs, with their lightweight architecture also supporting deployment on mobile devices.

“Models like Dhīr 2B and Dhīr 5B offer the flexibility to run across different computing platforms, including GPUs and TPUs. Their lightweight architecture also enables on-device deployment on mobile phones, without dependence on cloud connectivity,” said Prof Sashikumar, CEO of ZenteiQ AiTech Innovations.

“This allows users to access AI capabilities locally while keeping data on their devices, enhancing privacy, security and accessibility,” he added.

The models were developed by teams selected under the IndiaAI Innovation Centre’s Foundation Models pillar. The IndiaAI Mission provided access to subsidised national AI compute infrastructure and support for research expenses.

S Krishnan said the development of indigenous models would strengthen India's technological autonomy in artificial intelligence and create opportunities to improve productivity across government, industry, research and education.

He also highlighted AIKosh, the IndiaAI platform through which the models can be made available to researchers, students and developers for further experimentation.

Sudeep Shrivastava, COO of IndiaAI, said the models reflect progress across different categories of AI development, from lightweight systems for everyday devices to models built for complex enterprise applications.