Pratyush Kumar

Pratyush Kumar is an artificial-intelligence researcher and co-founder of Sarvam AI. His work has focused on efficient AI systems and technology for Indian languages.

Journey

Kumar completed bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 2009. He earned a PhD in computer engineering from ETH Zurich in 2014. He then worked in research roles at IBM Research and Microsoft Research before joining the faculty of IIT Madras.

At IIT Madras, Kumar worked on the interaction between machine learning and computing systems. He also co-founded One Fourth Labs, which offered practical and relatively affordable deep-learning education through the PadhAI programme. This was an early attempt to widen access to advanced AI skills rather than keeping them within a small research community.

Kumar later co-founded AI4Bharat, an open-source research initiative focused on Indian-language datasets, models and tools. The work highlighted a basic limitation in much global AI research: systems trained mainly on English were often expensive or ineffective when used across India’s many languages.

In August 2023, Kumar and Vivek Raghavan founded Sarvam AI. They set out to build a full technology stack for generative AI in India, covering models, voice interfaces, enterprise applications and deployment infrastructure. Sarvam has also participated in the IndiaAI Mission’s effort to develop indigenous foundation models.

Working approach

Kumar has defended an iterative approach to model building, arguing that early systems should be tested and improved rather than judged as finished products. His earlier work in teaching and open-source research also points to an emphasis on shared technical capacity.

Assessment

Kumar brings deep research and education experience to Sarvam. The central challenge is converting research for Indian languages into dependable products that users and institutions adopt, while keeping pace with much larger global AI laboratories.