Till the end of 2024, India’s stance on building homegrown foundational or large language models (LLMs) was ambiguous. One year later, all that has changed. Sovereign AI and homegrown large language models became a dominant theme for AI in India in 2025.

Despite the government announcing the INR 10,300 Cr IndiaAI Mission early last year, timelines for investment were vague, execution plans were still evolving, and many of India’s top tech leaders openly argued against India’s need for building LLMs.

But 2025 changed the equation. Beyond the buzz around agentic AI, the defining theme in India’s AI landscape this year became the government’s hunt for LLM builders. The urgency intensified after China’s DeepSeek unveiled its indigenous DeepSeek-R1 at dramatically low training costs, forcing India to move faster and with more clarity.

Soon, the IndiaAI Mission began identifying and backing companies capable of building sovereign models.

The first set of selections included Sarvam AI, Soket AI, Gnani.ai, and Gan.AI. The next tranche expanded to both enterprise and smaller players, such as BharatGen, Fractal Analytics, Tech Mahindra, Avataar AI, Zeinteiq Aitech Innovations, Genloop Intelligence, NeuroDX (Intellihealth), and Shodh AI.

Though most of these startups and enterprises are yet to launch their fully developed indigenous LLMs after months of groundwork, the ecosystem insists progress has been significant.

Ganesh Gopalan, cofounder and CEO of Gnani.ai, told Inc42, “We need to approach the matter from this lens: not just India, but every country in the world are forming their sovereign AI strategies. To some extent, this has to do with geopolitics, while it’s also how several government departments are seeing advantages in it. Investments in data centres are increasing too. So, all the preparations are on track for what is to come.”

Some examples include BharatGen, which publicly rolled out its first 3-Bn parameter model in July this year. Or Sarvam-M, a 24-Bn parameter open-weight hybrid language model was launched in May, albeit built on top of Mistral Small.

Fractal also launched its 14-Bn parameter open source LLM built with Deepseek. Other similar innovations fostering India’s sovereign AI ambitions have also accelerated this year.

But before looking ahead as to what awaits the country, it is worth looking back at how India has progressed so far, the delays and preparations, and how 2025 pushed India to start competing with Silicon Valley and other global giants on this front.

The Emergence Of India’s LLM Brigade

When the GenAI wave swept through the world, India was late in catching up with the pace. However, as the country started realising the mammoth impact of the wave, the first thing that the country focussed on was building applications leveraging the largely available foundational models like Gemini, OpenAI’s GPT, Llama, and others. The private capital also flowed in there.

Despite the huge cost of building the LLMs and hardly any government support at that point, many students and alumni of the IITs strongly........

© Inc42