Zeinteiq.ai gets ₹75 Cr boost under IndiaAI Mission to develop 8-billion-parameter scientific model

India has embarked on building its Scientific Foundation Model, with AI startup ZenteiQ.ai to contribute to this national initiative.

“We are proud to share that ZenteiQ.ai has been selected to build India’s Scientific Foundation Model (SFM), a vital step towards strengthening the country’s sovereign AI capabilities,” shared the Founder, Sashikumaar Ganesan, on LinkedIn.

Ashwini Vaishnaw announces during IndiaAI Summit Pre-event 

The official announcement was made by Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw during the IndiaAI Summit Pre-event in Delhi on September 18th.

The SFM is envisioned as an enabler for the Industrial and scientific community to support researchers, students, R&D and innovators with AI tools aligned to India’s scale, diversity, and aspirations.

“We are grateful to the IndiaAI mission, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and leadership for placing this trust in us,” Ganesan said.

The startup is one of the eight startups selected by the Indian government to build a sovereign foundational model under the IndiaAI Mission.

Founded in 2022 as an experiment in applying AI to higher education, ZenteiQ.ai pivoted to developing AI solutions for science and engineering R&D.

Its focus is on thermal analysis, from battery design and chip manufacturing to aerospace and electric vehicles.

Ganesan is a professor at IISc, where he leads the AI for Research and Engineering eXcellence (AiREX) Lab. His expertise spans Scientific Machine Learning (SciML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), High-performance computing, and hardware-aware numerical methods.

Under the IndiaAI Mission, ZenteiQ will receive ₹75 crore in the first year, with most of the funding earmarked for compute resources, crucial to train its planned 8-billion parameter model within 12 months.

As reported by the Businessline, apart from funding, the government is facilitating access to data centres equipped with high-end GPUs like NVIDIA H100S and H200S, ensuring that compute costs remain competitive.

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