Cheaper, faster, and culturally aware, Avataar’s video AI is built for India’s scale

India s AI model output has been slow compared to the U.S., Europe, and China. Only a few startups are releasing models, and most of them are large language models or voice models. To encourage more development, the government launched the India AI Mission , a roughly $1.2 billion initiative that — among other things — gives selected startups access to subsidized GPU compute in exchange for releasing their models publicly. One of the 12 startups selected for the program, Avataar AI , has launched a new video model called Varya that is built to understand local context — such as identifying different festivals, food, and clothing.