‘Frugal’ Sarvam AI did a DeepSeek with just 40 researchers

Sarvam AI has built its foundational models from the ground up with a lean team and limited compute, positioning itself as a frugal but ambitious Indian AI lab, said Pratyush Kumar, co-founder. He said the company trained multiple models internally, without relying on any external technology stack.

“DeepSeek had around 5,000 researchers working on its models, whereas we did it with 40 researchers,” Kumar told ET.