India’s Sarvam launches Indus AI chat app as competition heats up

Sarvam, an Indian AI startup building models designed for local languages and Indian users, on Friday launched its Indus chat app for web and mobile, stepping into a rapidly expanding market largely shaped by global giants such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

The rollout lands at a moment when India is emerging as one of the most important battlegrounds for generative AI adoption. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said ChatGPT has more than 100 million weekly active users in India. In contrast, Anthropic has said that India accounts for 5.8% of total Claude usage, second only to the U.S.

Indus is positioned as the chat interface for Sarvam’s newly introduced 105B model, a large language model with 105 billion parameters. The app arrives just two days after Bengaluru-based Sarvam presented its 105B and 30B models at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi earlier this week. At the same event, the company also detailed a broader push into enterprise offerings and hardware expansion, while announcing partnerships with firms including HMD to bring AI capabilities to Nokia feature phones and Bosch for AI-powered automotive applications.

Available in beta on iOS, Android, and the web, the Indus app lets users type or speak questions and receive responses in both text and audio. Users can sign in using a phone number, a Google or Microsoft account, or an Apple ID, although the service appears to be limited to India at this stage.

Indus also launches with a few notable constraints. Users can’t currently delete chat history unless they delete their account, and there’s no setting to turn off the app’s reasoning feature, which can slow down responses in some cases. Sarvam has also cautioned that access may be limited as the company scales up compute capacity.

“We’re gradually rolling out Indus on a limited compute capacity, so that you may hit a waitlist at first. We will expand access over time,” Sarvam co-founder Pratyush Kumar wrote on X, adding that the company is actively seeking feedback from early users.

Sarvam was founded in 2023 and has raised $41 million to date from investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Peak XV Partners, and Khosla Ventures, as it works to build large language models tailored for India.

The company is part of a small but growing set of Indian startups aiming to create domestic alternatives to global AI platforms, as India pushes for more control over its artificial intelligence infrastructure and future digital capabilities.