IIT Delhi Graduate Vivek Raghavan Named to

Vivek Raghavan, an IIT Delhi graduate, has been named to TIME’s TIME100 AI 2026 list. The list recognises 100 influential figures shaping the future of artificial intelligence.

Raghavan served as Chief Project Manager and Biometric Architect for Aadhaar. He worked on the project from its early years through its expansion into the world’s largest biometric identity system.

Before Aadhaar, Raghavan completed his B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Delhi. He then pursued an MS and PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.

He spent years in electronic design automation and held senior positions at technology companies. He also founded and ran companies in the sector.

The Aadhaar project gave him experience building technology for a population of India’s scale. This experience later shaped his approach to artificial intelligence.

Along with Pratyush Kumar, Raghavan worked with AI4Bharat at IIT Madras. The initiative focuses on developing open-source AI technologies for Indian languages.

The two later co-founded Sarvam AI in 2023. Their objective is to build AI models and a technology stack designed for India’s linguistic diversity.

For Raghavan, the question is also about technological independence. In an interview cited by TIME, he raised concerns about India becoming heavily dependent on foreign AI platforms.

He argued that the country risks exporting its data and importing intelligence.

This idea sits at the heart of Sarvam’s mission: developing AI that can work across India’s many languages and dialects.

India has 22 officially recognised languages and hundreds of dialects. This creates a need for systems that can understand, generate and process information across diverse linguistic contexts.

Sarvam has been working on multilingual models, including open-weight systems for reasoning, coding and mathematics. The company has also developed vision-language technology for processing documents in Indian languages.

In August 2026, Nvidia became a strategic investor in Sarvam AI as part of its Series B funding round.

The TIME100 AI recognition marks another milestone in a career that has moved from digital identity to artificial intelligence.

When Raghavan graduated from IIT Delhi, Aadhaar did not exist. Neither did generative AI in its present form.

Decades of work in engineering, computing and large-scale public technology placed him at the intersection of two of India’s biggest technology transformations.

From helping build an identity system for more than a billion people to attempting to build AI for a country of nearly 1.5 billion, Raghavan’s journey now carries a place among TIME’s 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence.