AI Summit 2026: India’s AI Startup ‘Sarvam AI’ Catches Google CEO’s Attention

• 20 Feb 2026
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While speaking at the India AI Impact Summit 2026, Google CEO Sunder Pichai publicly praised the Indian AI startup Sarvam AI, calling out the company’s work. The remarks by the CEO come at a time when the AI ecosystem in the country is heating up and the indigenous players are making efforts to come up with models that are tailored specifically to align with the linguistic diversity.  

The Google CEO mentioned the growing developer momentum in India. He singled out the regional language focus of Sarvam AI as particularly noteworthy. At the AI summit, PM Narendra Modi was spotted wearing Sarvam Kaze, a sleek spectacles-like AI device created by Sarvam AI, showing his support for the Indian AI startup. Find out what this startup is up to and why it’s getting global attention all of a sudden. 

Pichai Flags the Growing AI Momentum in India

During his address, Google CEO Pichai emphasized how each visit to India strengthens his belief in the country’s technical talent and entrepreneurial spirit. He cited Sarvam AI as a prime example of how a local innovation can help to address unique regional challenges. 

He said, “The work Sarvam has done developing local AI models… I just don’t see any impediments to that.” He added that, in the evolving AI landscape, the company appears to be “very, very well positioned”. This comment arrives at a time when the country is trying to position itself not merely as an AI consumer market but also as a foundational technologies’ creator. 

What Exactly is Sarvam AI Developing?

India’s homegrown AI Startup Sarvam AI was founded in August 2023. The Sarvam AI founders are Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar. The AI startup focuses on multimodal models designed specifically for Indian use cases. The Sarvam AI corporate office is located in Indiranagar, Bengaluru, Karnataka. 

According to the company, its vision-language model can perform tasks like image captioning, scene text recognition, chart interpretation and complex table parsing. The company's larger goal is quite ambitious. It is to unlock India's vast knowledge that is contained in scanned documents, archives and regional-language materials that global models tend to struggle with quite often. 

Recently, Kumar made a claim that Sarvam's Vision achieved an accuracy of 84.3 percent on the olmOCR-Bench English subset. Therefore, it outperformed models like Google’s Gemini 3 Pro and DeepSeek OCR 2.

Sarvam AI Places Heavy Focus on Indic Languages

What sets Sarvam AI apart from others is the fact that it is built for India’s language reality. It places a heavy focus on the Indic languages. According to the company, its models are trained across 22 official languages of India using datasets spanning financial records, newspapers, historical texts and literature. 

It is argued by the startup that many global AI systems still treat the Indian languages as secondary. Doing this can lead to weaker accuracy in the regional scripts. The approach of Sarvam attempts to address this gap while keeping the models relatively lightweight for on-device use.

For example, its speech recognition system supports a total of 10 Indian languages in a single compact model and can automatically detect which language is being spoken. Additionally, the translation engine can handle 110 language pairs without requiring an intermediate language. This is particularly useful in multilingual environments like India.

Availability and Early Access

Sarvam AI’s Document Intelligence API is currently free to try until February 2026. The developers can experiment with the company’s vision models on a large scale. 

While it remains to be seen whether the startup can sustain its early momentum, it has clearly gained significant attention from some of the leading figures in the global tech industry, marking its entry onto a much larger stage.