Soket Labs, ZenteiQ Launch Indigenous AI Models in India

Soket Labs and ZenteiQ AiTech Innovations have launched new indigenously developed large language models under the IndiaAI Mission. The models were unveiled at an event in New Delhi in the presence of IT secretary S Krishnan.

Soket’s EKA-1 is a 26.3 billion parameter model trained on nearly 7.5 trillion tokens, according to the IT ministry. It is described as an open, sparse hybrid language model that supports all 22 scheduled Indian languages as well as English, and is designed for mathematics, code generation, reasoning and agentic applications.

ZenteiQ introduced Dhīr 2B and Dhīr 5B, open-source multilingual models supporting English and 10 other Indian languages. The ministry said they offer on-premise deployment and applications such as document-grounded automation, knowledge retrieval and use cases across government and education.

Both startups were selected under the IndiaAI Innovation Centre pillar of the mission to develop domestic foundation models. According to the government, subsidised AI compute and support for ancillary research expenses helped enable their development.

The two releases address different deployment needs. EKA-1 targets mathematics, coding, reasoning and agentic use cases, while the Dhīr models focus on smaller multilingual assistants that can operate in environments with limited connectivity.

Speaking at the event, Krishnan said indigenous models will strengthen India’s technological and strategic autonomy while improving productivity across government, industry and research.

”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,” said Soket Labs cofounder and CEO Abhishek Upperwal.

ZenteiQ CEO Sashikumar said the Dhīr models can run across GPUs and TPUs, and that their lightweight architecture allows on-device deployment on mobile phones without dependence on cloud connectivity.