Who Is Vivek Raghavan, The Sarvam AI Co-Founder Named Among TIME's 100 Most Influential Leaders In AI

Vivek Raghavan, the co-founder of Indian AI startup Sarvam AI, has been featured among the 100 most influential leaders in artificial intelligence by TIME magazine.

Raghavan is known for playing an important role in “building a completely homegrown, Indian-language AI stack rather than relying on U.S. tech giants”. Earlier to Sarvam AI, Raghavan also played a key role in developing Aadhaar authentication system while working alongside Nandan Nilekani.

IIT Delhi alumnus

An alumnus of IIT Delhi, Raghavan completed his BTech in 1989 before earning a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1993.

He subsequently spent nearly two decades in the electronic design automation (EDA) industry and founded two EDA companies. He also held senior management positions at Magma Design Automation, Synopsys and Avant! Corporation.

Developing Aadhaar for India

His career took a major turn in 2010 when he joined the Aadhaar programme as its Chief Biometric Architect, serving in a voluntary capacity. Over the following years, he took on several technology and advisory responsibilities at the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).

Between 2013 and 2022, Raghavan was involved in the design, implementation and scaling of Aadhaar's technology platform. His work focused on creating biometric systems capable of operating at enormous scale. He later helped introduce artificial intelligence into Aadhaar-related processes, including improving service quality and detecting potential identity fraud.

Extensive work in AI

His involvement with technology extended beyond Aadhaar. Raghavan served as volunteer CTO of Team Indus, India's entry into the Google Lunar X-Prize. He was also part of the Supreme Court of India's AI committee and was involved in the rollout of SUVAS, a system designed to translate court judgments and orders into Indian languages.

Raghavan's growing focus on language technology brought him closer to India's broader digital public infrastructure ecosystem.

As Chief AI Evangelist at the EkStep Foundation, he worked with government and policy stakeholders and advised Bhashini, the Digital India initiative aimed at making digital services accessible in citizens' local languages.

He also served as Chief Mentor at the Nilekani Centre at AI4Bharat, IIT Madras.

Sarvam AI for Indian diversity

In August 2023, Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar co-founded Sarvam AI, turning that experience into a dedicated effort to develop AI systems for India's linguistic diversity.

The Bengaluru-based startup has since launched products including Sarvam Vision, an OCR and visual-understanding tool, and Bulbul V3, a multilingual text-to-speech model.

In August, Nvidia became a strategic investor in Sarvam AI, joining a roughly $75 million Series B funding round that values the business at about $1.5 billion.