Soket AI
Sovereign, Open, and Built for Bharat
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Soket AI Labs is making a bet that most of the AI industry considers impractical: building a 120-billion-parameter open-source foundation model from scratch, in India, specifically for Indian languages and cultural contexts. The project is called EKA, pronounced like the Sanskrit word for “one”, and it is designed, quite deliberately, to reduce both enterprise and government reliance on foreign AI systems.
Alongside EKA, Soket has released Dhriti, an emotion-aware speech recognition system that captures intonation and multilingual nuance in ways that generic models simply do not.
The Gurugram-based startup raised $2.41 million in seed funding in 2024 and is set to receive Rs 177.08 crore under the IndiaAI Mission. What distinguishes Soket beyond its technical ambition is its philosophy: transparent development, energy-efficient training, and a genuine commitment to balanced language representation. It is building for a world where sovereign AI is not a policy talking point but an actual architectural choice.
