Finnish phone maker HMD today launched its first smartphone, the Vibe 2 5G, which comes pre-loaded with AI from India. Sarvam’s chatbot Indus. Both companies were first It announced the partnership during the India AI Summit in New Delhi in February.
The Indus app is powered by Sarvam’s locally trained 105-billion-parameter model—a measure of the scale and complexity of AI—and Launched at the AI summit. The app supports 22 Hindi languages and mid-sentence code-switching (the ability to mix languages mid-conversation, for example switching between Hindi and English) that helps the assistant better understand the context of the query. Currently, the app doesn’t support offline usage and it doesn’t have a device-integrated feature to launch the AI assistant via a shortcut.
The partnership is a potential testing ground for both companies to gauge the appetite for an India-focused chatbot.
“The first thing we want to do with this partnership is bring the Indus app to consumers,” Ravi Kunwar, CEO and vice president of India and APAC at HMD, told TechCrunch. “Once they start using it, we’ll move into phase two to focus on driving more traction and stickiness. Right now, we want to be more accessible to users by pre-loading the app,” he said.
The Vibe 2 5G is a mid-range Android phone with a 6,000mAh battery and a price tag of ₹10,999 ($114). Kunwar added that smartphones in the Vibe series will also get a chatbot and the company is expected to launch a feature phone with Sarvam AI integration in the coming months.
This feature phone integration could ultimately be more important for both companies. According to analyst firm IDC, HMD had 4% of India’s feature phone market in 2025, but its smartphone share was negligible – the company doesn’t even appear in the top 15.
While it’s early days for Indus, the download numbers reflect that. About three months after its launch, the app has been downloaded a little over 293,000 times across platforms in India, according to Appfigures. For comparison, let’s note that ChatGPT has been downloaded 43.9 million times in the country.
It’s a big gap, but the strategy behind the HMD deal may matter more than the initial numbers. Combining a regional AI assistant with affordable hardware, especially feature phones, is one of the more direct distribution plays available in a market as large and linguistically diverse as India, where there is limited availability of English-language AI tools. For investors and operators watching how AI adoption is developing in emerging markets, this partnership is worth watching.
Sarvam has been one of India’s AI startups. Apart from the launch of the Indus app, the company focused on enterprise partnerships, especially for voice-based solutions. It is on track to become one of the most funded AI startups in the country reports offers A $300 million funding round is in the works, valued at $1.5 billion.
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