What are you building?RequiredThe answer that matters most
Product stageRequiredDevelopment, Beta or Production
FundingRequiredPre-seed to Series B+, Bootstrapped, or Seeking funding
IndustryRequired
Team sizeRequired
LocationRequired
Founders, with rolesRequired
LinkedIn profilesOptional
Step 2What you need
APIs you’re interested inRequired
Expected usage, Year 1Optional
Expected usage, Year 2Optional
Demo linkOptional
Step 3How you found us
Referred by someone?OptionalYes or no, and who
Anything else we should know?Optional
The form as it stood on 25 October 2026. Required fields are marked. The optional ones are where most applications are won or lost.
Have these ready so you finish in one sitting: each founder’s name, role and LinkedIn URL, your website, a demo link, and a usage estimate (section 03 shows how).
02Step 1
About you
What are you building?
This is where a reviewer decides whether your startup needs Sarvam. Answer in three or four sentences, covering these four things in order:
The problem, in concrete terms. Not “communication gaps” but “missed phone orders at rush hour”.
Who has it. A type of user, a place, and the language they speak.
How your product solves it, in one sentence a non-technical person could follow.
Which Sarvam API does which job. Most applicants leave this out. It’s what shows you’ve thought about building on Sarvam.
Weak
We are building an AI-powered voice platform to revolutionise commerce for Bharat.
Strong
Kirana stores in Hyderabad miss phone orders at rush hour, and most of their customers call in Telugu or Hindi, often switching to English mid-sentence. We answer those calls with a voice assistant that takes the order and sends it to the shopkeeper as a typed list. Sarvam speech-to-text understands the caller, Sarvam-105B works out the order, and text-to-speech reads it back for confirmation in the caller’s language.
Same startup, two answers. The second names the user, the language, the problem, and the exact Sarvam API behind each step.
Write about your own users in your own words. If you have traction, like a pilot, calls handled or a waitlist, add it as one plain sentence at the end. Never invent it.
Paste into your AI tool
I’m applying to the Sarvam Startup Program and need to answer the question “What are you building?”. My rough notes are below. Write the answer in 3 to 4 plain sentences that cover, in order: the specific problem, who has it (type of user, where they are, which languages they speak), how the product solves it, and which Sarvam API handles which step (choose from Speech-to-Text, Text-to-Speech, Translation, Chat Completion, Document Intelligence). No buzzwords like “revolutionise”, “AI-powered platform” or “Bharat-first”. Don’t invent users, numbers or partnerships that aren’t in my notes. If something important is missing, ask me instead of guessing. My notes: [paste your notes here]
The other fields
Website. Optional, but fill it. A live page, even a single one, shows the product exists outside the form.
Product stage. Pick the honest one. “Development” with a working demo reads better than “Production” with nothing to click.
Funding. “Bootstrapped” and “Seeking funding” are both options. Neither counts against you.
Founders and LinkedIn. List real roles, like “CEO, sales” or “CTO, built the voice pipeline”. If anyone has shipped speech or language products before, say so here.
03Step 2
What you need
APIs you’re interested in
Tick only the APIs your step 1 answer uses. Ticking all five reads as if you haven’t decided what you’re building. Before you tick one, check it supports your users’ languages: they don’t all cover the same ones.
API
Languages
Pay-as-you-go price
Speech-to-Text
Languages:22 Indian languages plus English
Pay-as-you-go price:₹0.49 a minute
Text-to-Speech
Languages:Bulbul v3: 11. v4 Flash: 10 (no Malayalam or Odia)
Pay-as-you-go price:₹2 per 1,000 characters (v4 Flash), ₹3 (v3)
Translation
Languages:Sarvam-Translate: 23. Mayura: 11
Pay-as-you-go price:₹2 per 1,000 characters
Chat Completion
Languages:11, for Sarvam-105B
Pay-as-you-go price:₹15 per million input tokens, ₹60 per million output
Document Intelligence
Languages:23
Pay-as-you-go price:₹0.50 a page to digitise, ₹1 to extract fields
The 11 languages are Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Odia and English. For anything else, check the models page before you name it in the form.
Expected usage, Year 1 and Year 2
Optional, but fill both. Credits are sized to your expected scale, so a number with its working shown gives Sarvam something to size them against. Work it out from the bottom up:
How many users or customers at the end of Year 1, and of Year 2?
For each one, how many minutes of audio, characters of speech or pages a month?
Multiply, then price it at the rates above.
For the kirana-store assistant from section 02, at 50 stores: each store gets 300 calls a month, each caller talks for about a minute and a half, the assistant speaks about 800 characters per call, and each call uses roughly 6,000 input and 600 output tokens of Sarvam-105B.
Per month, 50 stores
Usage
Cost at pay-as-you-go
Speech-to-Text
Usage:22,500 minutes
Cost at pay-as-you-go:₹11,025
Text-to-Speech (Bulbul v4 Flash)
Usage:1.2 crore characters
Cost at pay-as-you-go:₹24,000
Chat Completion (Sarvam-105B)
Usage:9 crore input, 90 lakh output tokens
Cost at pay-as-you-go:₹1,890
Total
Usage:15,000 calls
Cost at pay-as-you-go:About ₹37,000, or ₹740 per store
Growing steadily from zero to 50 stores, Year 1 averages half that monthly figure: roughly ₹2.2 lakh. Growing from 50 to 200 stores in Year 2 puts it near ₹11 lakh. Write the assumptions next to the totals and base them on users you can name or a growth rate you can explain. A big number with nothing behind it won’t get you more credits.
Paste into your AI tool
Help me estimate my Sarvam API usage for a startup program application. Look through this codebase (or my description below) and list every place the product calls, or will call, Sarvam: speech-to-text, text-to-speech, translation, chat completion or document intelligence. For each one, estimate usage per active user per month in the right unit: minutes of audio, characters of text, tokens, or pages. Then ask me how many active users I expect at the end of Year 1 and Year 2. Assume steady growth, so each year’s average is about halfway between its start and end numbers. Build a table with monthly and yearly usage per API, priced at these pay-as-you-go rates: speech-to-text ₹0.49 a minute, text-to-speech ₹2 per 1,000 characters, translation ₹2 per 1,000 characters, Sarvam-105B ₹15 per million input tokens and ₹60 per million output tokens, document digitisation ₹0.50 a page. Show the arithmetic and list every assumption so I can correct it. Don’t round numbers up to make them look bigger. My description: [paste here, or leave blank if you’re running this in the codebase]
Demo link
Optional, and the most persuasive field on the form. A Loom of a real call, a test phone number, a TestFlight build: anything a reviewer can try in two minutes. If it needs a login, include test credentials.
04Step 3
How you found us
Referred by someone?
If an accelerator, incubator or someone at Sarvam pointed you here, say yes and name them. Otherwise say no.
Anything else we should know?
Don’t leave it empty. Use it for:
Traction you can verify: pilot users, revenue, a waitlist.
Why now: a customer who has asked for this, or a launch date.
An API you plan to add later, and when.
Where “Powered by Sarvam” will appear in your product. The program requires it, and answering before they ask shows you’ve read the terms.
Before you submit
Checklist
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If you’d like help building the product itself, voice pipeline and all, that’s the kind of work Kalqore does.