Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu defends Sarvam AI amid backlash: ‘No product was ever an instant hit’

Despite Indian AI startup Sarvam being on the move to expand its operations with its latest flagship unveiling of Large Language Model (LLM), Sarvam-M, it’s not steered clear of the backlash coming its way. And so, Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu came to the company’s rescue this weekend.

As reviews for Sarvam AI‘s Sarvam-M, a 24-billion-parameter open-weights hybrid language model built on top of Mistral Small, continued to pour in on social media, the verdict was that international techies weren’t fully on board. Despite the company’s India-focussed game plan, comparisons with OpenAI or DeepSeek sought to question its position on the global mainstream.