Sarvam, an Indian AI startup focused on building artificial intelligence for local languages and everyday users, has introduced a new chat app called Indus for web and mobile. With this release, Sarvam steps into India’s rapidly expanding generative AI market, where global assistants have already gained massive traction and user attention.
India is quickly becoming one of the most important regions for AI adoption, thanks to its huge internet population and demand for tools that work well across diverse languages and voice-first use cases. Against that backdrop, Indus is positioned as a homegrown option designed specifically for Indian users, rather than a one-size-fits-all chatbot built primarily for Western audiences.
Indus acts as the chat interface for Sarvam’s newly announced Sarvam 105B model, a large language model with 105 billion parameters. The app’s debut follows closely after Sarvam revealed its 105B and 30B models at a major AI event in New Delhi, where the company also shared plans tied to enterprise deployment, hardware strategy, and collaborations. Among the partnerships mentioned were efforts to bring AI features to Nokia-branded feature phones through HMD, and to support automotive use cases with Bosch using AI-enabled capabilities.
Now available in beta on iOS, Android, and the web, the Indus chat app lets users type or speak questions and receive answers in both text and audio. Sign-in options include a phone number, a Google account, or Apple ID. At the moment, availability appears to be limited to users in India, reinforcing Sarvam’s focus on building for the domestic market first.
Like many early-stage AI products, Indus currently comes with some notable limitations. Users can’t delete chat history unless they delete their entire account, which may be a concern for people who want more privacy controls. There’s also no way to disable the app’s reasoning feature, and that extra processing can sometimes slow response times. Sarvam has also cautioned that access may be limited while it scales up computing capacity, meaning some users could encounter a waitlist during the rollout.
Sarvam co-founder Pratyush Kumar has said the company is expanding access gradually and actively looking for user feedback as it builds out the experience and infrastructure.
Founded in 2023, Sarvam has raised $41 million so far from investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Peak XV Partners, and Khosla Ventures. The funding is being used to develop large language models optimized for India, including support for local languages and the unique needs of Indian consumers and businesses.
Sarvam is part of a small but growing wave of Indian AI startups working to create domestic alternatives to global AI platforms. As interest in national-level AI infrastructure grows, products like Indus highlight a broader push toward building models, apps, and compute strategies that give India more control over how AI is developed and deployed for its own population.
