Vivek Raghavan

Over the past year, Vivek Raghavan has become one of the defining voices behind India's sovereign AI movement. Under his leadership, Sarvam AI unveiled the Sarvam-30B and Sarvam-105B open-weight foundation models, alongside speech, vision, and multilingual AI systems built specifically for Indian languages. 

The company also launched consumer AI assistant Indus, introduced the Sarvam Startup Programme to support early-stage AI companies, and laid out a roadmap for building India's AI stack across models, inference infrastructure, and developer platforms. Sarvam's work under the IndiaAI Mission has positioned it as one of the country's flagship foundation model developers.

Raghavan has consistently argued that sovereign AI is no longer optional for India. He has maintained that building foundation models from scratch is essential because Indian languages require fundamentally different tokenisation, datasets, and architectures rather than incremental fine-tuning of Western models. 

He has also championed a "frontier-minus-one" approach—building world-class models that are practical, affordable, and optimised for India's needs instead of competing solely on parameter count.