When Sarvam hosted its Epoch 2026 developer conference in Bengaluru this week, one individual quietly emerged as the centre of attention. It was not one of the company's founders or investors, but AI researcher Devendra Singh Chaplot, a prominent figure in Silicon Valley who has worked at some of the world's leading AI laboratories, including Mistral AI, Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab and Elon Musk's xAI. He is now bringing that experience to Sarvam as the startup pushes ahead with its ambition to build frontier AI in India.
Sarvam's plans are ambitious. The company has announced its intention to develop a trillion-parameter foundation model from scratch while expanding its AI research operations in the US through a new San Francisco office and a research lab in the Bay Area. It has also raised $234 million in the first close of its Series B funding round at a valuation of $1.5 billion. As part of its expansion, the company has appointed Chaplot as an advisor.
WHO IS DEVENDRA CHAPLOT?
According to his LinkedIn profile, Chaplot joined Sarvam as an advisor in July and will be based in Palo Alto, California, working from the company's US research hub.
Before joining Sarvam, he built an extensive career across several of the world's most prominent AI research organisations.
Chaplot completed his BTech in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Bombay before moving to the United States to pursue higher studies at Carnegie Mellon University. There, he earned a Master's degree in Language Technologies followed by a PhD in Machine Learning. His doctoral research focused on intelligent autonomous navigation, combining robotics, computer vision and artificial intelligence.
During his doctoral studies, he also worked as a research intern at Samsung Electronics and Apple.
He later spent more than five years at Facebook AI Research (FAIR), where he worked on embodied AI, robotics and computer vision, contributing to technologies that enable machines to better understand and navigate the physical world.
His breakthrough in frontier AI came in 2023 when he became one of the founding researchers at Mistral AI, the French startup that quickly emerged as Europe's leading challenger to OpenAI. During his time there, he contributed to several of the company's flagship models, including Mistral 7B, Mixtral 8x7B, Mistral Large, Pixtral 12B and Pixtral Large. He also helped establish and lead Mistral's US office in Palo Alto, gaining valuable experience in scaling a frontier AI company.
In early 2025, Chaplot joined Thinking Machines Lab, the startup founded by former OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati. As Tech Lead for Data and Pre-training, he worked on Tinker, the company's training API, and played a role in developing its large language model infrastructure.
Earlier this year, he moved to Elon Musk's xAI, now operating as SpaceXAI, where he worked on superintelligence research before leaving after a brief two-month stint.
JOINING SARVAM
Chaplot is now bringing his experience to Sarvam as the company seeks to build India's own frontier AI models capable of competing with global players such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
"I have been part of founding teams at frontier labs. You need a handful of experts and experienced people, but we also need highly motivated talent that can learn quickly and help build the company," he said while speaking at the Sarvam Epoch 2026 developer conference.
He also stressed the importance of developing AI models tailored specifically for India's linguistic and cultural diversity.
"For India, we have so many languages and cultures. We want models that can be customised. That is why we absolutely need to build these models here," he said.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Chaplot has joined Sarvam as a part-time advisor and will continue to be based in Palo Alto, working from the company's US research lab as it expands its presence in Silicon Valley.
Meanwhile, Sarvam is developing a foundation AI model with more than one trillion parameters while expanding research across coding, speech, vision, cybersecurity and scientific AI. By bringing Chaplot on board, the startup has added an AI researcher whose experience spans some of the world's leading frontier AI organisations, including Mistral AI, Thinking Machines Lab and xAI. His expertise is expected to play an important role as Sarvam pursues its ambition of building frontier AI from India.
