Funding · AI & Deep Tech

Soket AI secures ₹177 Cr from IndiaAI Mission for sovereign AI development

By Startup Enthusiast · 22 July 2026

What they do

Soket AI builds open-source AI tools for Indian languages and the Global South

The company received ₹177 Cr from the IndiaAI Mission for a sovereign AI model

Funds support Project EKA, a 120 billion parameter model for finance, defence, and law by 2027

Soket AI has secured ₹177 Cr in backing under the IndiaAI Mission initiative.
The funding breakdown includes ₹162 Cr in compute resources and ₹15 Cr for non-compute support.
The company is creating a sovereign open-source AI stack designed for Indic languages.
This support enables the development of Project EKA, a massive 120 billion parameter open-source model.
Project EKA aims to cover more than 20 languages across the Global South.
The model focuses on advanced capabilities including math, coding, structured logic, and reasoning.
Target sectors for this technology include banking, finance, cybersecurity, defence, law, and scientific research.
Soket AI plans to launch the full model sometime in 2027.

Soket AI develops custom data pipelines for collecting and cleaning data for low-resource languages.
The company uses harness engineering to connect raw model intelligence to enterprise applications.
Monetisation pathways include offering Foundation Model APIs and providing Enterprise Deployments.
All developed models will be open-sourced to the public.
The team is actively hiring specialised researchers and engineers alongside the founding team.
An intermediate milestone involves launching a 24 billion parameter model by the end of 2026.
The company showed an internal prototype for Hindi code generation in February 2026.
Commercial rollout will begin with testing the 24 billion parameter model with small enterprise partners.
The company is actively looking to raise additional money and has received some commitments.

IndiaAI Mission (lead) — Government initiative supporting AI development in India.