Indian Startup Sarvam Launches Indus AI App Amid Growing Market Rivalry

In a rapidly expanding sector dominated by multinational firms like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, Sarvam, an Indian AI startup that specialises in creating models for regional languages and users, released its Indus chat app for online and mobile users on Friday.

Global AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini tend to compete with Indus, an AI conversation app developed by the Indian startup Sarvam AI. With support for many languages and local cultural considerations, the software is targeted for the Indian market.

The announcement coincides with India emerging as a major front in the deployment of generative AI. According to Anthropic, India accounts for 5.8% of all Claude usage, second only to the U.S., while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently stated that ChatGPT has over 100 million weekly active users in India. acts as a conversation interface for the business’s recently unveiled Sarvam 105B model, a big language model with 105 billion parameters. 

The software was released two days after Sarvam, a Bengaluru-based company, earlier this week at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, debuted its 105B and 30B models. The startup also presented hardware plans and enterprise strategies during the summit, and it announced collaborations with companies like Bosch for AI-enabled automotive applications and HMD to bring AI to Nokia feature phones.

The Indus app, which is now in beta on iOS, Android, and the web, lets users speak or type questions and get text and audio answers. Although the service seems to be restricted to India for the time being, users can log in using their phone number, Google or Microsoft account, or Apple ID.

There are presently some restrictions on the app. There is no way to turn off the app’s reasoning feature, which occasionally causes reaction speeds to lag, and users cannot erase their chat history without also deleting their account. Sarvam has also cautioned that as it progressively increases its computational capacity, access can be limited.

You might initially encounter a queue because we’re implementing Indus progressively on a restricted compute power. Pratyush Kumar, a co-founder of Sarvam, stated on X, “We will expand access over time,” adding that the business is looking for consumer input.

As it develops extensive language models specifically for India, Sarvam, which was founded in 2023, has raised $41 million from investors to date, including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Peak XV Partners, and Khosla Ventures.

As India seeks more control over its AI infrastructure, Sarvam is one of a small but expanding group of Indian entrepreneurs working to provide homegrown alternatives to international AI platforms.

Characteristics features of Indus

• Multilingual Support: 22 Indian languages are supported for voice and text enquiries. During a discussion, users can switch between languages.
• Voice-First Experience: It provides low-latency audio answers in eleven Indian languages.
• AI Agents & Tools: It enables document analysis for PDFs and pictures and has writing tools.
• Model: Sarvam’s 105B parameter model, which was unveiled at the India AI Impact Summit 2026, is used by the app.

Users can access the Indus application through web, iOS, and Android platforms and their availability.

• Waitlist: Invite codes can get around a waitlist that may apply to new users.
• Geographic Restrictions: Users in India are the only ones with access.

As an early beta, the Indus AI app currently has certain restrictions:

• History: It is not possible to remove individual chat histories.
• Reasoning function: Occasionally, the reasoning function may cause replies to lag.
• Knowledge Cutoff: June 2025 is when the model’s training data expires.