Sarvam Ropes In Google Cloud India MD Sashikumar Sreedharan As President & CBO

AI unicorn Sarvam has appointed former Google Cloud India managing director Sashikumar Sreedharan as its president and chief business officer (CBO), as it looks to strengthen its enterprise and government business and scale the commercial deployment of its AI technology.

In his new role, Sreedharan will lead Sarvam’s business across enterprises and government institutions while expanding its engagement with digital-native companies, developers and partners. He will also oversee marketing, finance, forward-deployed engineering, service delivery and commercial operations, the company said in a blog post.

Sreedharan will also join the company’s board of directors.

Before joining Sarvam, Sreedharan  served as MD of Google Cloud India for over a year. Across a career spanning about 35 years, he has served across companies like Microsoft India, IBM, Wipro, Happiest Mind Technologies, among others.

His appointment comes as Sarvam looks to move beyond developing indigenous AI models and build a larger enterprise business around its technology.

The startup said it provides its full-stack AI offerings to over 100 enterprises and government institutions.  “The next phase of Sarvam is about advancing our research, developing products loved by people around the world, and building a company that can operate at a much greater scale,” the startup said. 

Sarvam AI’s Push To Build The India Stack

Founded in 2023 by Pratyush Kumar and Vivek Raghavan, Sarvam develops foundational AI models, computing infrastructure, and enterprise applications. Its offerings target businesses and government agencies seeking tools tailored to Indian languages, data-security requirements, and local use cases.

The new CBO appointment comes shortly after Sarvam expanded its AI portfolio with the launch of Prism. The “System One” decision model built on top of Sarvam AI’s Sarvam 105B foundation model. Rather than generating open-ended text token-by-token like a conventional LLM, it evaluates a given context, a question, and a predefined list of options in a single processing pass to return calibrated probabilities for each choice.

The startup has also released several other models in recent months, including Sarvam Vision 2.1, a vision-language model for processing documents and recognising text in Indian languages, and Saaras V4, its speech-to-text model. In October, it launched Bulbul V4 Flash, a text-to-speech model for generating natural speech across Indian languages.

Earlier this year, Sarvam raised $234 Mn in the first close of its $300 Mn Series B funding round, which valued the company at $1.5 Bn. The unicorn minting round saw participation from investors HCLTech, Bessemer Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners.

It is now reportedly in talks with Nasdaq-listed IT services company Cognizant Technology Solutions to raise further funds for the round. It is looking to raise around $300 Mn at a valuation of around $3.5 Bn to $4 Bn. 

The post Sarvam Ropes In Google Cloud India MD Sashikumar Sreedharan As President & CBO appeared first on Inc42 Media.