I now suspect that the reason
@SarvamAI was turned down by SoftBank, Prosus, a16z, General Atlantic and Accel was because they were scared of how TALENTED
@pratykumar and team are and therefore wanted to deny funding for them for fear of an Anthropic competitor and competition at the global level between countries.
If you know anything about VC economics it's that every investment they make needs to at the very least have the potential to return their entire portfolio which requires a massive Total Addressable Market. In practice this rule tends to be so restrictive that you can't really afford to have any other rules, and there is little doubt that Sarvams team lacks anything but sky high potential.
They also made it a point to announce this publicly as a signal to make it harder for Sarvam to gain funding because Venture Capitalists tend to be extremely herd like in their behaviour. Making this announcement shortly before the national level restriction of Anthropic was unlikely to be an accident as it must have been heavily debated, negotiated and finalized behind closed doors before the information became public.
No biggie, the team is going to win out in the end. Because we have diversity and crowd and advanced digital infrastructure. We have an AI Talent Penetration Index which is higher than all OECD Countries. And open source needs a thriving ecosystem which we have. The headstart that Anthropic and Open AI had was a first mover advantage. What will end up mattering more is the last mover advantage - i.e. who builds out their product and ecosystem around it to use and create improvements.
Ultimately the economics of comparative advantage and token costs will push the talent network to build on the Sarvam stack not the Anthropic one. And if they try to stop NVIDIA, then the
@GoI_MeitY
Semiconductor mission will only make us even stronger not weaker.
Don't be fooled by the temporary challenges, time is on our side. Bullish
@SarvamAI
And Bullish India 🇮🇳🇮🇳🇮🇳🇮🇳🇮🇳🇮🇳🇮🇳
🚨 Bloomberg: India's AI startup Sarvam AI was reportedly turned down by SoftBank, Prosus, a16z, General Atlantic and Accel during fundraising efforts.
• 🇮🇳 Sarvam is still on track to raise ~$300M at a ~$1.5B valuation
• Backed by Nvidia and focused on sovereign AI for India