Sarvam AI Begins Hiring for New San Francisco Office

Indian AI startup Sarvam AI is gearing up for a deeper presence in the United States, with plans to establish an office in San Francisco and actively recruit AI talent from the Bay Area.

The development was revealed by Hemant Mohapatra, Partner at Lightspeed and an early backer of the company.

“Beautiful evening in SF, a wonderful housefull event with Pratyush Kumar of Sarvam AI talking about the company’s plans, hiring for an SF office, scaling out compute, building v. large models, and global GTM,” he wrote in a post on X.

A Sarvam AI engineer told AIM that the hiring push will focus largely on research roles.

The expansion comes as the Bengaluru-based startup looks to tap into global AI talent while continuing to build foundational AI models tailored for India. 

Founded in 2023 by AI researchers Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, Sarvam has positioned itself as a sovereign AI company focused on Indian languages, speech technologies, and large language models.

Sarvam has gained prominence over the past year through its government-backed efforts to build indigenous AI models and the launch of open-source large language models built for Indian use cases. 

The company earlier this year introduced its 30-billion and 105-billion parameter models and launched the Indus AI chatbot, placing it in direct competition with global players such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.

The hiring push comes as Sarvam is reportedly in talks to raise between $200 million and $300 million in a fresh funding round that could value the startup between $1.2 billion and $1.5 billion.

Update: This story has been updated with additional information from a Sarvam AI engineer, who said most of the planned hires in San Francisco will be for research roles.