India's AI battlefield just got fiercer. Bengaluru-based startup Sarvam AI stealth-launched Indus, its multilingual chat app powered by the mighty Sarvam 105B model, on February 20, 2026, mere days after disclosing 105B and 30B LLMs at the India AI Impact Summit. 

Now in beta on iOS, Android, and web (indus.sarvam.ai), Indus is entering a market where ChatGPT boasts 100M+ weekly Indian users, and Claude claims a 5.8% global share (second to the US).

Google CEO Sundar Pichai's recent praise, "Sarvam's local models have no impediments, very well positioned," fuels the hype. As OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google dominate, Sarvam bets on sovereignty: Built entirely in India for 22+ Indic languages, voice-first, culturally attuned.

From Summit Spotlight to Consumer Hands

Indus interfaces Sarvam 105B (105B parameters, mixture-of-experts for complex reasoning; 128K token context) and nimble 30B (real-time chats). Disclosed amid summit buzz, partnerships with HMD (Nokia feature phones), Bosch (auto AI), the app rolled out gradually on limited compute. 

Beta quirks: No per-chat deletion (full account wipe only), mandatory reasoning mode (slows some responses). Phone/Google/Microsoft/Apple login; India-limited now. Early users rave on Reddit/YouTube: Seamless Hinglish switching, ethical dilemmas solved step by step, puzzles cracked in Hindi.

Tailored for Bharat: Features That Speak Local

Indus shines where globals falter, Indic mastery. Type/speak in any of 22 scheduled languages; mid-chat switches (English→Hindi→Tamil) flow naturally. Upload images/PDFs for analysis; future AI agents automate tasks, in-app doc edit/write.

Voice-first: Bulbul TTS (11 langs, 39 voices), Saaras STT (code-mixed, telephony audio). Reasoning demos crush: River crossing puzzles, math series, trolley ethics, historical what-ifs, all Hindi/English, step-by-step. YouTube tests (e.g., Nitish Verma) hail puzzle-solving, troubleshooting smarts.

Beta perks: Free API trials for devs; file uploads for visual reasoning (charts/tables/handwritten Indic scripts).

Sarvam's Rebel Rise: $41M Fuel, Sovereign Vision

Founded in 2023 by Raghavan/Kumar, Sarvam snagged $41M from Lightspeed, Peak XV, and Khosla, building Indic-optimized LLMs amid data scarcity. Unlike English-biased GPT-4, Sarvam trains on local data for accuracy in dialects/scripts. Summit feats: Outperformed Gemini/ChatGPT on Indic OCR (84.3% olmOCR-Bench).

Enterprise wins: UIDAI (Aadhaar voice/fraud), Odisha/Tamil Nadu AI hubs, SBI Life (11-lang policy bots). Consumer Indus democratizes it.

Full List of Supported Languages

Sarvam 105B supports all 22 scheduled languages of India, as defined in the Constitution's Eighth Schedule, trained on high-quality Indic datasets for superior handling of code-mixed speech, scripts, and contexts.

These form India's official linguistic backbone, enabling seamless multilingual interactions in Indus and enterprise apps:

• Assamese
• Bengali
• Bodo
• Dogri
• Gujarati
• Hindi
• Kannada
• Kashmiri
• Konkani
• Maithili
• Malayalam
• Manipuri (Meitei)
• Marathi
• Nepali
• Odia
• Punjabi
• Sanskrit
• Santali
• Sindhi
• Tamil
• Telugu
• Urdu​

Battle for India's AI Soul

India's genAI frenzy, 100M ChatGPT users, demands sovereignty. Indus fights import reliance, privacy risks. Competitors: Global giants (latency, culture gaps); locals like Krutrim, CoRover lag scale. Sarvam's edge: Open-source leanings, partnerships (Nokia cars/glasses).

Challenges: Compute scaling (waitlists), refinement (deletions/reasoning toggle). Upside: Population-scale data moat, govt IndiaAI Mission backing.

Indus isn't just code, it's India's digital voice. From Hinglish banter to ethical debates, Sarvam crafts AI that gets us.