Sarvam Signs Defence AI Deal with Indian Navy to Power Multimodal DRONA 2.0
DRONA, short for DSSC Resource Optimising Neural AI, was first launched by the military institution in June 2025 as a customised GPT for AI-assisted training.
Indian AI startup Sarvam AI has partnered with the Defence Services Staff College (DSSC), Wellington, to develop and expand AI applications for defence education and strategic studies.
The partnership was announced alongside the launch of DRONA 2.0, a multimodal AI system developed by DSSC that integrates Sarvam’s indigenous Sarvam 105B large language model with open-source models.
DRONA, short for DSSC Resource Optimising Neural AI, was first launched by the military institution in June 2025 as a customised GPT for AI-assisted training.
The upgraded DRONA 2.0 adds capabilities including reasoning, document inference, image recognition and generation, speech-to-text and text-to-speech, translation and transliteration, as well as podcast, presentation and data-analytics generation.
The system is hosted on a GPU server at DSSC and has undergone an audit and certification process by Headquarters Integrated Defence Staff and the Defence Cyber Agency.
The newly signed memorandum of understanding between DSSC and Sarvam will cover further development of DRONA GPT and other AI-based applications. The system has also been trained on a large repository of academic material held by DSSC, to support faculty and students in accessing information and conducting research in defence and strategic studies.
The partnership gives Sarvam another entry point into India's defence and government AI ecosystem, where data sovereignty, secure deployment and control over AI infrastructure are increasingly important.
Sarvam has already established partnerships across several government departments and states. In March 2025, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) partnered with Sarvam to deploy AI-powered voice interactions, multilingual support and real-time fraud alerts for Aadhaar services. The solution operates within UIDAI’s secure, air-gapped infrastructure and initially supports 10 Indian languages.
Sarvam has also partnered with the governments of Odisha and Tamil Nadu on sovereign AI infrastructure. Odisha is planning a 50MW AI-optimised capacity hub, while Tamil Nadu and IIT Madras are developing Digital Sangam, a sovereign AI research park anchored by a 20MW AI data centre.
In April 2025, Sarvam was selected under the IndiaAI Mission to build India's sovereign large language model, receiving dedicated compute resources for development.
On 11 August 2026, Sarvam announced that the Government of Maharashtra approved the deployment of its sovereign AI workspace, Indus, across state government departments, with around 2,500 government officials expected to use it in their daily work.
The startup recently raised $234 million in the first close of a $300 million Series B in June 2026, at a post-money valuation of $1.5 billion. It plans to build India's first trillion-parameter AI model.
