Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy recently said that Indians are good at applying ideas generated elsewhere for the betterment of the nation. He also added that it would take time for the country to invent new things.
“There are going to be APIs and people are going to use them. That’s the way things will get built. It’s not bad to be a wrapper, it’s just that you shouldn’t be a shallow wrapper. You have to think about the value you’re adding on top of the model,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
India might have arrived late to the AI party, but the future of AI in India is not that bleak. With an increase in investments, more initiatives like AI4Bharat, and industry and academia partnerships to bolster research in the country, India can definitely up its AI game!
Top GenAI Indian Startups in 2024
| Name | Models/Industry | Founder Name |
| KOGO AI | Indic languages | Raj K Gopalakrishnan |
| Sarvam AI | LLMs | Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar |
| PAiGPT | AI Chatbot | Eshank Agarwal, Addya Rai, Siddharth Singh, and Deepanshu Singh |
| Soket AI Labs | Ethical AGI | Abhishek Upperwal |
| KissanAI | Agri-tech startup | Pratik Desai |
| Subtl.ai | Llama 3 8B model | Vishnu Ramesh |
| dot.agent | Agent Management System | Anurag Bisoi |
| Stition.ai | Security for LLMs | Mufeed VH |
| CognitiveLab | Indic LLM | Adithya S Kolavi |
| MachineHack | Data analysis tool | Bhasker Gupta |
| TWO | Multilingual and cost-efficient language | Pranav Mistry |
| Tensoic | LLaMA | Adarsh Shirawalmath |
Here are 12 Indian startups that are leading the GenAI wave in India.
1. KOGO AI
Bengaluru-based deep tech startup KOGO AI has developed a platform that helps companies build AI agents that can converse in Indic languages. Using the platform, companies can build an AI agent from scratch within minutes.
Initially, these agents will be able to support conversations in Urdu, Hindi, and English, with plans to include another 73 languages, both Indian and global, soon.
For this, the Bengaluru-based startup has partnered with Bhashini, the Indian government’s initiative aimed at breaking language barriers in India, and Microsoft to make the agents multilingual.
2. Sarvam AI
Established in July 2023, Sarvam AI was co-founded by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar to make generative AI accessible to everyone in India at scale.
“We think this is a foundational technology, and we don’t want India to become solely a prompt engineering nation,” said Raghavan in an exclusive interview with AIM.
The company has raised $41 million in its Series A funding round led by Lightspeed Ventures with participation from Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures.
Last year, Sarvam AI also open sourced OpenHathi, an Indic Hindi LLM built on top of Llama 2. On Hugging Face, the model has been downloaded more than 18,000 times last month.
It recently also open-sourced ‘Samvaad’, a curated dataset with 100,000 high-quality conversations in English, Hindi, and Hinglish, totalling over 700,000 turns.
Further, Sarvam AI is collaborating with Meta to develop vernacular LLMs and has partnered with Microsoft to create an Indic voice based LLM.
3. PAiGPT
PAiGPT, India’s first AI chatbot for UPSC aspirants, recently released its app for Android and iOS.
The app’s USP is its ability to fetch real-time information on various topics and current affairs, similar to Perplexity AI and Google Gemini. However, what sets it apart is its feature that provides trending topics and the option to create multiple-choice questions based on the available information.
Founded in September 2022 by Eshank Agarwal, Addya Rai, Siddharth Singh, and Deepanshu Singh, the app also allows aspirants to upload images of editorials from popular newspapers and then generate summaries.
4. Soket AI Labs
India now has a company building solutions to achieve AGI and beyond. Soket Labs is an AI research firm with a vision to further the advancement in AI towards ethical AGI.
Founded in 2019 by Abhishek Upperwal, the company is part of NVIDIA’s Inception Programme and AWS Activate for training compute access.
Soket AI Labs recently introduced Pragna-1B, India’s first open-source multilingual model designed to cater to the linguistic diversity of the country. Available in Hindi, Gujarati, Bangla, and English, the model comes with 1.25 billion parameters and a context length of 2048 tokens.
5. KissanAI
In a major step forward for AI in agriculture, agri-tech startup KissanAI recently launched Dhenu Vision LLMs for crop disease detection.
Last year, KissanAI also released Dhenu 1.0, an agricultural LLM tailored for Indian farmers. Recently, it released Dhenu Llama 3, fine-tuned on Llama3 8B.
The agriculture generative AI startup also teamed up with UNDP to develop the pioneering voice-based vernacular generative AI CoPilot for Climate Resilient Agriculture (CRA) practices. This initiative aims to deliver crucial advice to thousands of Indian farmers, especially smallholders who have been hit hard by climate change.
6. Subtl.ai
Subtl.ai, is addressing the challenges of generative AI in enterprise environments. It focuses on creating solutions that enable enterprises to handle sensitive data securely without exposing it to the internet.
Vishnu Ramesh, founder of Subtl.ai, calls it a ‘private Perplexity built on light models for enterprise’.
Subtl.ai has developed a proprietary product that leverages the Llama 3 8B model, allowing businesses like the State Bank of India to access and respond to inquiries quickly and securely, directly citing provided sources of information.
7. dot.agent
dot.agent is the world’s first AMS (AI/Agent Management System) that acts as a central hub that directs requests to the most suitable AI agent or model for the task. This “smart dispatcher” continuously learns from your data & adapts to your specific use case.
It allows Dot to outperform AI models like GPT-4 and Devin in real-world use cases, potentially reducing your AI costs by up to 60%! Dot for Code Generation is also purportedly 8x better than GPT-4.
8. Stition.ai
Stition.ai focuses on building security products for LLMs. Stition’s security product that can automatically find safety flaws without human intervention and patch vulnerabilities has been in public beta since December. A full release is expected soon.
Mufeed VH, the founder of Stition.AI, recently released an open-source passion project called Devika. This Indian version of Devin can understand human instructions, break them down into tasks, conduct research, and autonomously write code to achieve set objectives.
9. CognitiveLab
Founded by Adithya S Kolavi, CognitiveLab recently released an Indic LLM leaderboard for the growing number of Indic language models entering the scene without a uniform evaluation framework.
The Indic LLM leaderboard offers support for seven Indic languages – Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi, and Gujarati – providing a comprehensive assessment platform. Hosted on Hugging Face, it currently supports four Indic benchmarks, with plans for additional benchmarks in the future.
10. MachineHack
MachineHack Generative AI, one of the few pure-play generative AI startups in India, has launched DataLyze, a generative AI data analysis tool, making data analytics accessible to everyone.
Launched in 2018, MachineHack is an all-in-one platform designed for data engineers, data scientists, machine learners, and developers at all levels. Users can enhance their skills, compare their expertise with peers, write articles, learn coding, apply for jobs, and build impressive portfolios.
11. TWO
TWO is a tech company that aims to redefine human-AI interactions through its proprietary multilingual and cost-efficient language models called SUTRA. These are ultrafast, multilingual, online generative AI models that can operate in 50+ languages with conversational, search, and visual capabilities.
SUTRA-Online are internet-connected and hallucination-free models that understand queries, browse the web and summarise information to provide current answers. It can answer queries like “Who won the game last night?” or “What’s the current stock price?” accurately.
12. Tensoic
Mumbai-based software development company Tensoic released a Kannada Llama aka Kan-LLaMA — a 7B Llama-2 model, LoRA PreTrained and FineTuned on Kannada tokens.
Just a few days after releasing Kan-Llama, the researchers also released a playground to test the model. Hooked to NVIDIA A100 GPUs, Tensoic released the playground in partnership with E2E Networks, one of the biggest providers of cloud GPUs in India.
