The government is set to announce the selection of BharatGen, Fractal, Tech Mahindra, and five other firms for the second phase of the IndiaAI Mission next week in New Delhi, according to sources in the department of science and technology. The move marks a major step in strengthening India’s efforts to build sovereign and open-source foundational models.
Along with BharatGen, the other companies expected to be included are Avataar.ai, ZenteiQ.ai, Genloop, Intellihealth, and ShodhAI. These selections will expand the foundation model initiative to a total of 12 companies, adding to the existing four—Soket AI Labs, gnani.ai, Gan.AI, and Sarvam.
Mumbai-based Fractal recently launched its open-source large language model Fathom-R1-14B, which it claims delivers mathematical reasoning that outperforms o1-mini and o3-mini and is close to o4-mini levels, all at a post-training cost of just 499 dollars. The company is also preparing for an IPO later this year.
BharatGen, funded by the department of science and technology, launched its first foundational model Param-1 in May 2025. This bilingual model, with 2.9 billion parameters, was built entirely from scratch and featured 25 percent Indic data, significantly higher than global models like Meta’s Llama, which used just 0.01 percent. The BharatGen team, led by Professor Ganesh Ramakrishnan of IIT Bombay, also released 20 speech models across 19 Indian languages on AIKosha, aimed at building voice-first interfaces. “We have made significant technical progress, and the announcement of our models has already come from the DST secretary,” Ramakrishnan said earlier. The consortium includes IIT Bombay, IIT Kanpur, IIT Mandi, IIT Madras, IIT Hyderabad, IIIT Hyderabad, and IIM Indore.
Sarvam, the first firm selected under the IndiaAI Mission, is expected to launch its foundational model early next year.
The IndiaAI Mission, supported by the Ministry of Electronics and IT, has also been scaling its compute capacity. In May, the government revealed that GPU capacity under the IndiaAI Compute Pillar had reached 34,000, through a mix of public and private support. Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has emphasised that each selected team must aim to become a top five global player in their focus area, whether in multilingual foundation models, speech AI, or multimodal technologies.
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