In a landmark move for India's technological sovereignty, the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) has officially stepped into the corporate arena. The institute has registered its own company, marking a strategic shift from academic research to market-driven development in the critical field of artificial intelligence.
From Academic Project to Corporate Entity: The Birth of BharatGen
On November 7, 2025, the BharatGen Technology Foundation was formally registered with the Registrar of Companies in Mumbai. Unlike typical incubated startups, this entity is owned and anchored by IIT Bombay itself, using the institute's Powai address. This corporate structure is designed to provide the functional freedom needed to transition AI models from the laboratory to the marketplace.
"To take the models from the lab to market requires the functional freedom and autonomy of a corporation as opposed to being just an academic project," explained Professor Ganesh Ramakrishnan, the founder director of BharatGen Technology Foundation and a professor at IIT Bombay.
Building an AI That Thinks and Sounds Like India
BharatGen represents India's pioneering attempt to create a homegrown Large Language Model (LLM) that truly reflects the nation's immense linguistic, cultural, and social diversity. The project is designed to work seamlessly across more than 22 Indian languages, combining text, speech, and document vision capabilities.
The core ambition is to build AI systems that interpret information the way Indian citizens naturally speak, read, and interact. Professor Ramakrishnan emphasized that the strength of BharatGen lies in training its systems on home-grown datasets and Indian languages, an approach expected to make the AI far more dependable and relevant for real-world applications within the country.
Massive Funding and a National Consortium for Sovereign AI
The initiative first took shape last year with an initial support of Rs 235 crore from the Department of Science and Technology (DST) under its National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS). This early bet signaled the government's commitment to public AI infrastructure.
The project has now received a massive boost, securing an additional Rs 1,058 crore from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) under the IndiaAI Mission. This funding expands BharatGen into a full-fledged national sovereign AI effort.
Led by IIT Bombay, the BharatGen consortium is a powerhouse of Indian academia, bringing together several leading institutions:
- IIT Madras
- IIT Kanpur
- IIIT Hyderabad
- IIT Mandi
- IIT Hyderabad
- IIM Indore
- IIT Kharagpur
- IIIT Delhi
This collaborative model pools expertise from across the country to tackle the ambitious goal.
Empowering Innovators: The BharatGen Vision
A key part of BharatGen's strategy is to democratize access to advanced AI. The foundation plans to release distilled, more efficient versions of its large models to developers. This will allow Indian startups and enterprises to integrate sovereign AI capabilities into their products without bearing the prohibitive cost and expertise required to train such colossal systems from scratch.
"BharatGen will do the heavy lifting so the country's innovators can get straight to building," said Prof. Ramakrishnan. This approach is poised to accelerate India's AI ecosystem, fostering innovation while ensuring the core technology remains rooted in domestic development and control.
The establishment of BharatGen Technology Foundation by IIT Bombay is more than a corporate filing; it is a definitive signal of India's intent to build and own the foundational technology that will shape its digital future, ensuring its AI speaks its language and understands its context.
