As India sharpens its artificial intelligence ambitions, a new crop of home grown AI companies is rallying behind Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of “AI for All”, building indigenous, inclusive and globally competitive technologies tailored for the country’s needs. From multilingual voice systems to sovereign cloud infrastructure and foundation models, these firms are pushing the case for ‘Swadeshi AI’ — designed in India, for India and increasingly for the world.Bengaluru-based deep-tech startup Gnani.ai is among the frontrunners shaping this movement. Talking to The Triune, CEO Ganesh Gopalan, who co-founded the company in 2017 with CTO Ananth Nagaraj, both former Texas Instruments colleagues, said the idea was to build core AI systems for India long before AI became fashionable.“The Sanskrit-derived name “Gnani,” meaning knowledge, reflects that mission. Today, the company serves over 200 global enterprises with voice-first conversational AI, automation tools and voice biometrics solutions such as Armour365,” he said.Gopalan recently showcased the firm’s speech-to-speech AI system, capable of real-time translation across Indian languages. “One of India’s biggest barriers is language,” he said, adding that foreign AI tools often failed in India’s multilingual, cost-sensitive environment.“For instance, Gnani’s systems allow a user to speak in Tamil and be heard in Hindi instantly, a leap for customer service, governance and digital inclusion,” he stated.Gopalan said, “The company is also embedding emotional intelligence into human-machine conversations, enabling AI to interpret tone, sentiment and conversational nuance rather than just words.”If Gnani.ai is localising AI interaction, NeevCloud is building the backbone that powers it. Founder Narendra Sain described NeevCloud as “India’s own public cloud company”, focused on creating end-to-end sovereign AI infrastructure from data centres to cloud layers capable of supporting foundation models and enterprise AI applications.With operations beginning in Indore and teams now spread across Bengaluru and other cities, Sain said the company was addressing a structural gap — India’s dependence on foreign cloud providers. “If data is oil, the refineries should be ours,” Sain said, adding that control over compute infrastructure will define technological sovereignty.Citing ISRO and indigenous tech successes, he said, “India has the talent and innovation depth, but has historically lacked patient R&D capital. With government funding support now expanding, we can expect to produce globally competitive AI platforms built in India the next decade.Adding momentum to the swadeshi AI push is Sarvam AI, another high-profile startup building India-centric large language models and generative AI systems. Co-founded by AI researchers, including Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, the company focuses on foundational models trained on Indian languages and datasets.Together, these companies signal a strategic shift from consuming global AI to creating sovereign capability. As India scales digital public infrastructure and AI adoption across sectors, the swadeshi AI movement is no longer rhetorical, it is fast becoming the technological spine of PM Modi’s “AI for All” ambition.
