BharatGen is likely to be selected for the second phase of the IndiaAI Mission, alongside seven other firms, marking a significant boost for its efforts to build open-source foundational models for Indian developers and researchers, sources in the department of science and technology told AIM.
According to sources, IndiaAI Mission will announce the move next week in an event in New Delhi, alongside the announcement of seven other firms, including Fractal, Tech Mahindra, Avataar.ai, ZenteiQ.ai, Genloop, Intellihealth, and Shodh AI.
These selections would make a total of 12 companies under the Mission’s foundation model initiative, joining the existing 4: Soket AI Labs, gnani.ai, Gan.AI, and Sarvam.
In May, Mumbai-based Fractal launched its open-source LLM, Fathom-R1-14B. The company claimed that the model delivers mathematical reasoning performance that surpasses o1-mini and o3-mini, and approaches o4-mini levels, all at a post-training cost of just $499. The company is slated to go for an IPO later this year.
The government’s push to create sovereign AI models is now widening, with BharatGen, funded by the department of science and technology, becoming another player to take on the challenge.
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 the Ministry of Electronics and IT, 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, supported by a mix of public and private players.
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.
