IndiaAI Mission releases three indigenous AI models by Soket, ZenteiQ

The IndiaAI Mission on Tuesday released three indigenous artificial intelligence models developed by domestic firms Soket Labs and ZenteiQ.

The models — EKA-1 by Soket Labs and Dhīr 2B and Dhīr 5B by ZenteiQ AiTech Innovations — were unveiled at an event in New Delhi in the presence of Electronics and IT Secretary S Krishnan and senior officials.

EKA-1 is a 26.3-billion-parameter model trained on around 7.5 trillion tokens. It supports all 22 scheduled Indian languages and English and is designed for mathematical tasks, coding, reasoning and agentic applications.

Soket said the model has been developed with a focus on India's banking, financial services and cybersecurity sectors.

"With the support of the IndiaAI Mission, we have developed an advanced AI model specifically tailored to India's unique banking, financial services and cybersecurity landscape," Abhishek Upperwal, CEO of Soket Labs, said.

The model is built as an open, sparse hybrid language model.

ZenteiQ's Dhīr 2B and Dhīr 5B are open-source multilingual models supporting English and 10 Indian languages. They are designed for secure, on-premise deployment, including in environments where internet connectivity is limited or data security is a priority.

The models can support document-based automation, information retrieval and citizen and enterprise services across defence, government, industrial and educational sectors.

ZenteiQ CEO Prof Sashikumar said the lightweight models can run on different computing platforms, including GPUs and TPUs, and can also be deployed on mobile phones.

"This allows users to access AI capabilities locally while keeping data on their devices, enhancing privacy, security and accessibility," he said.

The two companies were selected under the IndiaAI Innovation Centre pillar of the IndiaAI Mission, which supports the development of indigenous foundation models and large language models.

The mission provided access to subsidised national AI computing infrastructure and support for ancillary research expenses to facilitate their development.

Krishnan said the development of indigenous models would strengthen India's technological and strategic autonomy in artificial intelligence and create opportunities to improve productivity across government, industry, research and education.

He said platforms such as AIKosh would help make these models accessible to researchers, students, innovators and the wider public, encouraging further experimentation.