How much funding has Soket AI Labs raised?

Soket AI Labs has raised $2.35M in total funding. Their latest funding round was Seed. Key investors include Lightspeed India, Together Fund.

Where is Soket AI Labs headquartered?

Soket AI Labs is headquartered in Gurugram, Haryana, India. The company has a team of 11-50 people.

What does Soket AI Labs do?

Soket AI Labs operates in the Foundation Models / LLMs sector. Indian AI research firm building sovereign multilingual foundational models (Project EKA - 120B parameter LLM) and real-time speech AI products, selected under the IndiaAI Mission. Building sovereign AI foundation models for India and the Global South, with native support for 22 Indian languages and 60+ languages total, optimized tokenization for Indic scripts, and open-source contributions to the AI ecosystem

When was Soket AI Labs founded?

Soket AI Labs was founded in 2019. It is based in Gurugram, Haryana, India.

How much funding has Soket AI Labs raised?

Soket AI Labs has raised $2.35M in total funding. Key investors include Lightspeed India, Together Fund.

Who is the CEO of Soket AI Labs?

Abhishek Upperwal is the CEO of Soket AI Labs. The company was founded in 2019.

Where is Soket AI Labs located?

Soket AI Labs is headquartered in Gurugram, Haryana, India.

What funding stage is Soket AI Labs at?

Soket AI Labs is currently at the Growth Stage stage.

How many employees does Soket AI Labs have?

Soket AI Labs has approximately 11-50 employees.

Soket AI Labs

Category: Foundation Models / LLMs

Indian AI research firm building sovereign multilingual foundational models (Project EKA - 120B parameter LLM) and real-time speech AI products, selected under the IndiaAI Mission. Soket AI Labs was founded in 2019. The company is led by Abhishek Upperwal. Based in Gurugram, Haryana, India. Team size: 11-50. Total funding raised: $2.35M. Latest round: Seed. Key investors include Lightspeed India, Together Fund.

Founded: 2019
Headquarters: Gurugram, Haryana, India
Team size: 11-50
Total funding: $2.35M

Value proposition

Building sovereign AI foundation models for India and the Global South, with native support for 22 Indian languages and 60+ languages total, optimized tokenization for Indic scripts, and open-source contributions to the AI ecosystem

Products and solutions

Project EKA (120B+ parameter sparse MoE foundational model for math, code, reasoning & multilingual AI), Pragna-1B (1.25B parameter open-source multilingual LLM), DHRITH (emotion-aware speech recognition system), TensorStudio (Realtime Speech API for voice agents), Bhasha Dataset Series (open-source multilingual datasets), GenAI Studio (modular AI developer platform)

Unique value

India's first open-source multilingual foundation model (Pragna-1B) and Project EKA — a 120B+ parameter sovereign LLM backed by the IndiaAI Mission, purpose-built for Indic languages with tokenizer efficiency 2-10x better than global models for Indian languages

Target customer

Indian IT services companies, government departments, public-sector enterprises, defence, agriculture, financial services, and BFSI sector

Industries served

IT Services, Government & Public Sector, Defence, Agriculture, Financial Services, BFSI, Healthcare, Education

Technology advantage

Proprietary tokenizer achieving 2-10x better fertility scores for Indic languages vs. global models; Bhasha Dataset Corpus (44.1M articles across 6 Indian languages); Sparse MoE architecture for 120B+ parameter model; access to 1,536 NVIDIA H100 GPUs via IndiaAI Mission; COOM training framework based on Megatron-Core; FlashAttention2 and FSDP for efficient training

How they differentiate

Soket AI differentiates through its sovereign AI focus for India, with tokenizers that are 2-10x more efficient for Indic languages than models like Llama, GPT, or Gemma. Their Bhasha dataset series provides open-source, culturally-contextualized training data. Selected under the IndiaAI Mission with access to 1,536 NVIDIA H100 GPUs for sovereign compute. Open-sources key components (Pragna-1B, Bhasha datasets, CoSHE-Eval benchmark) to build community around Indic AI.

Main competitors

Sarvam AI, Gnani.ai, Krutrim (by Ola)

Key partnerships

IndiaAI Mission (MeitY), Google Cloud, IIT Gandhinagar, IIT Roorkee, IISc Bangalore, AI4Bharat, ICRISAT

Major milestones

2019: Company incorporated, 2023: Accelerated AI efforts after Sam Altman's remark, 2024: Launched Pragna-1B (India's first open-source multilingual LLM) with Google Cloud, Released Bhasha Dataset series, 2025: Selected under IndiaAI Mission (one of 12 organizations), Launched DHRITH speech recognition, 2026: Announced Project EKA (120B parameter model), Raised $2.2M Seed round, Selected as one of 4 startups to build Indian LLMs under IndiaAI Mission, Feb 2026: Presented EKΛ Code 24B at IndiaAI Impact Summit, May 2026: Partnered with ICRISAT for climate-smart agriculture AI

Market positioning

One of 12 organizations shortlisted under India's ₹10,037 Cr IndiaAI Mission to build indigenous foundational AI models. Positioned as a research-first startup focused on sovereign AI for India, competing with Sarvam AI (the most well-funded Indic LLM startup) and Krutrim. Differentiated by open-source approach and focus on coding use cases for Indian IT services industry.

Geographic focus

India (primary), Global South markets (secondary)

About Abhishek Upperwal

Ex-Data Scientist; Master's in Computational Data Science from Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore, specializing in High-Performance Computing; worked with Smart Cities Mission under Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs

Latest news about Soket AI Labs

Soket AI Labs, backed by IndiaAI Mission, is building a 120-billion-parameter foundational AI model optimized for coding and all 22 scheduled Indic languages, with early interest from domestic IT serv

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Official website: https://soket.ai