The IndiaAI Mission publicly released three homegrown AI foundation models in New Delhi on 3 November 2026. Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) Secretary S Krishnan unveiled EKA-1, built by Soket Labs, and Dhir 2B and Dhir 5B, built by Bengaluru-based ZenteiQ, in the presence of senior MeitY and IndiaAI officials.

The release is one of the first public outputs from the startups the government picked to build sovereign models under the mission’s foundation model pillar, and it comes as the mission scales up shared compute through its 10,000-GPU tender run by C-DAC.

What the IndiaAI foundation models are

ZenteiQ, which was born at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore and is led by founder Prof Sashikumaar Ganesan, builds its Dhir family as scientific foundation models pretrained from scratch rather than adapted from existing model weights. According to the company, Dhir 2B is a dense model with 2.03 billion parameters, while Dhir 5B uses a mixture-of-experts design with 5.09 billion total parameters, of which 1.79 billion are active at a time.

Both Dhir models are compact enough to run fully offline on laptops and edge devices. Enterprises can fine-tune them on their own data and deploy them on their own infrastructure. A larger Dhir 9B model is in development.

Soket Labs did not disclose a parameter count for EKA-1 in the launch reports. The startup, founded in 2019 by Abhishek Upperwal, runs Project EKA, and it earlier presented its EKA Code 24B model to Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the IndiaAI Impact Summit 2026.

How the startups were chosen

MeitY selected Soket AI in May 2025 to develop India’s first open-source 120-billion-parameter foundation model tuned for the country’s linguistic diversity, with defence, healthcare and education as target sectors. ZenteiQ was named in September 2025 to build India’s Scientific Foundation Model, with ₹75 crore earmarked in its first year, mostly for compute.

The two launches add to a growing shelf of Indian models, from CoRover’s three BharatGPT models listed on AIKosh to the government-backed BharatGen sovereign AI programme.

Why it matters for enterprise AI in India

Small models that run offline give Indian enterprises and public bodies an option for sensitive engineering, defence and government data that cannot leave their premises. They also cut the cost of running AI compared with large cloud-hosted models.

The bigger test is still ahead. The mission’s flagship commitments include Soket’s planned 120-billion-parameter model and Sarvam’s push towards a trillion-parameter model, and CIOs will watch how these models perform on benchmarks and in real deployments.

Key takeaways

• MeitY Secretary S Krishnan released EKA-1 by Soket Labs and Dhir 2B and Dhir 5B by ZenteiQ under the IndiaAI Mission on 3 November 2026.
• The Dhir models are pretrained from scratch, run offline on laptops and edge devices, and can be fine-tuned on enterprise data.
• Soket is also building a 120-billion-parameter open-source model for Indian languages under the mission.

FAQ

Who built the new IndiaAI foundation models?

EKA-1 was built by Soket Labs, and Dhir 2B and Dhir 5B were built by ZenteiQ, an IISc Bangalore-born startup.

Can the Dhir models run without the cloud?

Yes. ZenteiQ says Dhir 2B and Dhir 5B run fully offline on laptops and edge devices and can be deployed on an enterprise’s own infrastructure.

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