IndiaAI Mission has announced the selection of eight firms for the second phase. As reported exclusively by AIM earlier, this includes BharatGen, Tech Mahindra Fractal, and five others firms.
The declaration was made at the AI Impact Summit 2026 on September 18 in New Delhi, conducted by the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY).
Avataar.ai, ZenteiQ.ai, Genloop, NeuroDX (IntelliHealth), and Shodh AI are the other firms that have been selected, taking the total to 12 companies under the Mission’s foundation model initiative, joining the existing four: Soket AI Labs, gnani.ai, Gan.AI, and Sarvam.
The inclusion of BharatGen, which is funded by the department of science and technology, becomes another player to take on the challenge of building India’s sovereign AI model.
BharatGen has proposed building several AI models for the country starting from 2 billion parameters to 2 trillion. It had launched its first foundational LLM, Param-1, in May 2025. Built entirely from scratch, the 2.9 billion parameter bilingual model featured 25% Indic data—far higher than global counterparts such as Meta’s Llama, which had just 0.01%.
The team, led by Prof Ganesh Ramakrishnan at IIT Bombay, also released 20 speech models across 19 Indian languages on AIKosha, targeting voice-first interfaces. “We have made significant technical progress, and the announcement of our models has already come from the DST secretary,” Ramakrishnan earlier told AIM. The BharatGen consortium comprises IIT Bombay, IIT Kanpur, IIT Mandi, IIT Madras, IIT Hyderabad, IIIT Hyderabad, and IIM Indore.
Sarvam, the first to get selected under the IndiaAI Mission, is expected to launch its foundational model early next year.
The IndiaAI Mission, backed by MeitY, has been ramping up both compute and model-building capacity. In May, the government announced that total GPU capacity under the IndiaAI Compute Pillar had expanded to 34,000 GPUs, supported by a mix of public and private players. It is expected to expand further to 40,000 GPUs soon.
Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has repeatedly stressed that the goal for each selected team is to become a global top-five player in their chosen sector, whether in multilingual foundation models, speech AI, or multimodal applications.
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