Vivek Raghavan

Dr. Vivek Raghavan is a technologist, entrepreneur, and architect of digital public infrastructure with a focus on making technology accessible across India, regardless of language or economic background. Raghavan is an alumnus of IIT Delhi and holds a doctorate in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. He spent two decades in the electronics design and manufacturing industry before returning to India, where he served as managing director of semiconductor design company Synopsys.

Raghavan has played a significant role in building digital public infrastructure, notably contributing to Aadhaar, the world's largest biometric ID system. He joined the Aadhaar program as its chief biometric architect in a voluntary capacity and later took on technology and advisory responsibilities at the Unique Identification Authority of India. Raghavan was involved in the design, implementation, and scaling of Aadhaar's technology platform, focusing on biometric systems capable of operating at national scale. He also introduced artificial intelligence into Aadhaar-related processes to improve service quality and detect potential identity fraud. Raghavan has advised on AI integration for national initiatives such as GSTN and UPI, and has served as a mentor to AI4Bharat and advisor to Bhashini, contributing to open-source datasets and benchmarks in Indian languages.

With co-founder Pratyush Kumar, Raghavan worked on open-source AI for Indian languages at AI4Bharat, a research lab at IIT Madras, before launching Sarvam AI. Sarvam AI develops multilingual Indian models to compete with global AI companies. As co-founder, Raghavan has emphasized the importance of AI sovereignty and building a homegrown, Indian-language AI stack. Sarvam AI addresses India's cultural and linguistic diversity, supporting 22 official languages and numerous dialects. The company was selected by the IndiaAI Mission to build the country's first sovereign large language model ecosystem, developing an open-source 120-billion-parameter AI model to enhance governance and public service access.

Sarvam AI has released "Sarvam 30B" and "Sarvam 105B," two open-source, open-weight models capable of advanced reasoning, coding, and mathematics. "Sarvam Vision," its vision language model, can scan and extract text from documents in 22 Indian languages and English. Sarvam AI is backed by HCLTech and Nvidia and is valued at approximately $1.5 billion. Raghavan has received recognition for his contributions to artificial intelligence, digital governance, and public service, including a D.Litt for his roles in Aadhaar, language AI, and digital public goods. He has been named one of the 100 most influential leaders in artificial intelligence by TIME Magazine, reflecting his influence in the global conversation on sovereign and inclusive AI.