MeitY Selects Four Startups to Spearhead ₹10,000 Cr IndiaAI Mission

 

 

 

In a significant leap toward strengthening India’s AI capabilities, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has selected four pioneering startups—Sarvam AI, Soket AI Labs, Gnani.ai, and Gan.ai—to lead foundational model development under the ambitious ₹10,000 crore IndiaAI Mission. The initiative aims to position India as a global leader in artificial intelligence by creating scalable, inclusive, and indigenous AI infrastructure tailored to the country’s unique linguistic and cultural diversity.

Empowering Indigenous Innovation Through Foundational AI Models

MeitY’s decision marks a crucial step toward fostering homegrown AI startups and building sovereign AI capabilities that align with India’s strategic and digital goals. The chosen startups will focus on developing foundational large language models (LLMs) and multimodal AI models that can cater to India’s complex multilingual ecosystem.

Soket AI Labs is spearheading the EKA Project, which envisions a massive 120-billion parameter Indic LLM—one of the largest AI models focused on Indian languages to date. This model is expected to revolutionize natural language understanding and generation across regional dialects and use cases such as governance, education, and citizen services.

Sarvam AI, another frontrunner in the mission, is developing a 70-billion parameter multimodal model that integrates text, image, and audio inputs to enhance contextual understanding and AI-human interaction. Rather than receiving direct funding, Sarvam AI is poised to get ₹200 crore worth of GPU compute support, highlighting MeitY’s focus on providing the critical compute infrastructure needed for training large-scale AI models.

Gnani.ai and Gan.ai, both known for their work in voice AI, generative AI, and multilingual speech technologies, are expected to contribute models and applications that support real-time voice translation, regional language dubbing, and automated content creation.

IndiaAI Mission

The IndiaAI Mission, first announced as part of the Union Budget and backed by a massive ₹10,000 crore investment, seeks to develop a comprehensive ecosystem for AI innovation in India. This includes:

Establishing a National Data Management Office for high-quality open datasets

Creating a network of AI innovation hubs and research centers

Enabling access to public digital infrastructure and GPU-as-a-service platforms

Encouraging ethical AI development, transparency, and data governance

MeitY’s selection of these startups sends a strong signal about its pro-innovation policy stance, promoting startup ecosystem growth, deep-tech research, and AI model sovereignty in the face of growing global competition.

Foundational models serve as the building blocks for a wide range of AI applications. For India—a country with over 20 official languages and hundreds of dialects—developing Indic-focused LLMs is essential to ensure that AI technologies are inclusive, culturally aware, and linguistically accessible.

From automated governance services to personalized learning platforms, these models could support use cases that span e-governance, agritech, healthcare, education, financial inclusion, and more—transforming how India’s 1.4 billion citizens engage with technology. Once launched, these projects could serve as a blueprint for public-private partnerships in AI development and showcase India’s ability to produce scalable, cutting-edge AI models that reflect the needs of its diverse population.