IIT Bombay Establishes BharatGen Foundation to Develop India’s First Sovereign AI System for 22 Languages

The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) has just taken a big leap beyond classrooms and research labs. It’s officially set up its own AI company. The new organisation, BharatGen Technology Foundation, aims to build what many are calling India’s first real shot at a national, sovereign AI system.

Registered on November 7, 2025 at the Powai campus, BharatGen is designed to create a homegrown Large Language Model (LLM) that truly understands India, its languages, accents, scripts, and cultural nuances, as reported by the Times of India (TOI). Think of an AI that can seamlessly work across more than 22 Indian languages, not just in text, but in speech and document understanding too. In short, it’s about building tech that speaks the way India actually speaks.

The project has sturdy backing as well. It has already received Rs 235 crore from the Department of Science and Technology and another Rs 1,058 crore from the Ministry of Electronics and IT under the IndiaAI Mission. According to Professor Ganesh Ramakrishnan, the foundation’s founder-director quoted by TOI, creating a dedicated company gives the team the freedom and agility needed to move these massive models from “research mode” to real-world use.

BharatGen is working with a consortium of top institutions—from IITs to IIITs—and plans to offer “distilled versions” of its models. Basically, they’ll handle the heavy, expensive R&D work so startups and companies can plug into these models without needing supercomputers or huge budgets.

In the long run, the idea is simple: build India’s own AI backbone and make it easy for innovators to create apps and tools that truly fit India’s multilingual, multicultural reality.