The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, widely regarded as a cradle for India’s top technology ventures has reached a landmark moment. For the first time in its history, the institute has set up its own company. This isn’t a typical campus startup or a faculty-led initiative; it is a full-fledged organisation owned and steered by IIT Bombay itself.
On November 7, 2025, the BharatGen Technology Foundation was officially registered with the Registrar of Companies in Mumbai, using IIT Bombay’s Powai address. This strategic move signals how the premier institution aims to directly shape India’s next big wave in artificial intelligence.
BharatGen represents India’s first coordinated attempt to develop a Large Language Model (LLM) that reflects the country’s cultural nuances, linguistic richness, and social complexity. The idea began taking shape last year when the Department of Science and Technology (DST) allocated ₹235 crore as early funding, recognising the need to build public digital infrastructure for AI.
The initiative operates under the DST’s National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS). Anchored by IIT Bombay, the BharatGen consortium includes other leading institutes such as IIT Madras, IIT Kanpur, IIIT Hyderabad, IIT Mandi, IIT Hyderabad, IIM Indore, IIT Kharagpur, and IIIT Delhi.
According to Prof. Ganesh Ramakrishnan, the founder-director of BharatGen Technology Foundation, creating a corporate entity was essential. “Taking AI models out of academic labs and into practical, market-ready solutions requires the autonomy and operational flexibility that only a company can provide,” he explained.
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BharatGen aims to develop models capable of handling 22+ Indian languages and integrating text, speech, and document vision making AI more intuitive for Indian users. By training models on large-scale indigenous datasets, the foundation hopes to build systems that “sound Indian, think Indian, and work reliably in Indian environments.”
Prof. Ramakrishnan also shared that BharatGen will release scaled-down, developer-friendly versions of its models. This will help startups and enterprises adopt sovereign AI without bearing the cost and complexity of training massive models from scratch. “We will manage the heavy engineering so innovators can focus on building solutions,” he said.
With an additional ₹1,058 crore support from the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) under the IndiaAI Mission, BharatGen is now evolving into a national flagship effort toward creating India’s own sovereign AI ecosystem.
