Union Electronics and IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on Sunday (February 8) praised homegrown AI startup Sarvam AI, highlighting its advanced models as a success of India's sovereign artificial intelligence strategy.
His remarks come a day after Deedy Das, a Silicon Valley investor and partner at Menlo Ventures, publicly lauded Sarvam AI, marking a sharp turnaround from his earlier criticism.
From scepticism to recognition
Deedy Das, a partner at the US-based venture capital firm Menlo Ventures, initially criticised Sarvam AI in May 2025 for its first large language model, Sarvam-M. He noted that the 24-billion-parameter model, trained on Indic languages, had recorded only 23 downloads shortly after launch, drawing unfavourable comparisons with a Korean open-source model built by two students. At the time, Das questioned India's ability to produce globally competitive foundational models, reflecting broader doubts about the country's AI ecosystem. Zoho co-founder Sridhar Vembu defended Sarvam AI, noting that slow initial traction is common for pioneering products and encouraging the team to continue their work.
Das on Saturday (February 7) publicly reversed his view. He praised Sarvam AI's work on text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and OCR models for Indic languages, highlighting the startup's ease of use, polished design, and focus on neglected local-language AI. He acknowledged that his earlier doubts about training smaller Indic-language models were mistaken, calling Sarvam's technical execution "really valuable."
Sarvam Vision sets new benchmarks
The company few days ago launched its multimodal AI model. The 3-billion-parameter system combines OCR, layout understanding, and visual reasoning across 22 Indian languages. It topped olmOCR-Bench with 84.3% accuracy for English documents and an average word accuracy of 87.36% across Indic languages, outperforming global models like Google Gemini 3 Pro on complex OCR tasks. Sarvam Vision can parse PDFs, scientific papers, historical scans, tables, charts, and formulas - tasks where conventional OCR often struggles.
Founded in 2023 by veterans of India's Aadhaar project, Sarvam AI is offering free access to its Document Intelligence APIs, aiming to accelerate India-first AI applications.
Government backing and broader AI mission
Minister Vaishnaw noted that even the most critical reviewers now praise Sarvam AI, reinforcing the IndiaAI Mission's impact. Approved by the Modi government in 2024 with Rs 10,300 crore over five years, the mission supports AI innovation in healthcare, materials science, and cybersecurity.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has urged startups to make AI affordable, inclusive, and regionally relevant. India will further showcase its AI capabilities at the 'India AI Impact Summit 2026' from February 16-20, cementing its role in global technology.