Indian AI startup Sarvam has appointed leading AI researcher Devendra Singh Chaplot as a part-time advisor, strengthening its AI research capabilities as it works on building a 1-trillion-parameter AI model in India.
Chaplot joins Sarvam after leaving xAI (now SpaceXAI), Elon Musk’s AI company. Before that, he was part of the founding teams at Mistral AI in France and Thinking Machine Labs, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI executive Mira Murati.
His appointment marks a significant milestone for Sarvam, becoming one of the first Indian AI startups to attract a leading AI researcher at a time when global companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic are competing aggressively for top AI talent.
Chaplot announced his association with Sarvam during the Sarvam Epoch 2026 event in Bengaluru. He highlighted the importance of building strong AI teams, saying, “I’ve been part of founding teams at cutting-edge labs. You need a handful of experts and experienced individuals, but we also require more motivated talent capable of getting up to speed quickly and driving the company forward.”
The appointment comes as Sarvam launches a new AI research lab in San Francisco, USA. Based in Palo Alto, Chaplot will work from the new facility.
An alumnus of IIT Bombay, Chaplot has more than a decade of experience in artificial intelligence. He briefly joined xAI in March and left in April, according to his LinkedIn profile. Earlier, he served as Technical Lead for Data and Pre-training at Thinking Machine Labs, where he worked on the Tinker training API.
As a founding researcher at Mistral AI, Chaplot contributed to training Mistral 7B, Mixtral 8x7B, and Mistral Large, while also helping establish the company’s Palo Alto office. He has also held research roles at Facebook AI Research, Apple, and Samsung. His work spans machine learning, robotics, computer vision, embodied AI, navigation, multimodal systems, and large language models.
Chaplot holds a PhD in Machine Learning and a Master’s degree in Language Technologies from Carnegie Mellon University, along with a B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Bombay.
Speaking about India’s AI future, Chaplot said, “In India, we have a vast diversity of languages and cultures. We want models that can be customized. That is why it is crucial that we develop the models here.” He further added, “The model itself is not the goal, as it eventually becomes obsolete; what endures above all is knowing how to build and train your own models.”
At the Sarvam Epoch event, the company also introduced Saras V4, Bulbul V4, and Vision 2.0. Sarvam is India’s first AI unicorn, with a valuation of $1.5 billion after raising $234 million in a Series B funding round led by HCLTech.
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