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Bengaluru startup employee says parents were not happy when he quit Microsoft: ‘now they’re smiling’

Sarvam AI's Harveen Singh Chadha shares how his parents, once unhappy with his job change from Microsoft, now proudly promote his company.

Updated on: Feb 22, 2026 10:05 AM IST
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Sarvam AI’s stellar showing at the recently-concluded India AI Impact Summit in Delhi has had at least one unlikely benefit for an employee — Harveen Singh Chadha said that his parents, initially unhappy that he quit Microsoft to join the startup, have now had a change of heart.

Harveen Singh Chadha (L) is an LLM Researcher at Sarvam AI. (LinkedIn)
Harveen Singh Chadha (L) is an LLM Researcher at Sarvam AI. (LinkedIn)

What is Sarvam AI?

Sarvam AI is an Indian artificial intelligence company based in Bengaluru that was founded in 2023. The startup builds large language models (LLMs) and multimodal AI systems.

Leveraging the spotlight at the recent AI summit, Sarvam unveiled its own AI model, designed from the ground up for Indian users. The voice-first service supports nearly two dozen Indian languages — a feature the company sees as a key advantage in a country of 1.45 billion people, where most users cannot read, write, or comfortably type in English. (Also read: What is Sarvam, India's AI model praised by Google CEO Pichai and has an edge against ChatGPT, Claude)

Sarvam employee’s post

Harveen Singh Chadha, an LLM Researcher at Sarvam, said his parents’ attitude towards his job change has undergone a sea change. Chadha quit Microsoft in April 2025 to join Sarvam AI.

“10 months back parents were not happy when I left MS. Today when I reached, they were smiling,” the Sarvam employee said in an X post.

He said that his proud parents have been saving all news mentions of Sarvam and even promoting the company on WhatsApp groups.

“Dad showed me all the news channel recordings, newspapers mentions of Sarvam. Mom told me how she promoted sarvam in WhatsApp groups and to neighbours,” said Chadha. “Overall, a very small win but a long way to go.”

The post drew warm reactions on X.

“Build from India . Build for world . We are having the opportunity to leapfrog generation of gaps,” wrote one X user.

“Working for the country is the proudest thing anyone can do,” another said.

“There is something special about seeing doubt turn into quiet support,” a third person added.

Sarvam founder on AI

Speaking at the India AI Summit 2026, Sarvam co-founder Vivek Raghavan stated that the development of indigenous technology remains a critical priority for national interests. Raghavan noted that many existing technologies were historically proprietary, leading to the creation of self-created, open-source public infrastructure.

"Many of these technologies were proprietary technologies, and we built this kind of self-created technology that is open source and a public infrastructure that is available to all of us and that led to the creation of the India stack. So when you look at it over the course of long periods of time, sovereignty will always trump technical beads," Raghavan said.

(With inputs from agencies)

  • Sanya Jain
    ABOUT THE AUTHOR
    Sanya Jain

    Sanya Jain is an Assistant Editor with Hindustan Times Digital. She has nearly a decade of experience in covering offbeat stories that speak to the everyday experience - from viral videos to human interest copies that spark conversation. Her interests stretch across business, pop culture, social media trends, entertainment and global affairs. Before joining Hindustan Times, Sanya spent two years with Moneycontrol and five years with NDTV. She holds an undergraduate degree in English literature from St Stephen’s College, Delhi, and a master’s in journalism from the Xavier Institute of Communications, Mumbai. Sanya has a sharp eye for spotting emerging trends and looking for newsworthy angles to elevate viral posts into meaningful narratives. She was the first one, for example, to cover Narayana Murthy’s remark on 70-hour work weeks that sparked a national conversation. She is equally at ease writing about business leaders as about the common man, about issues of national importance and memes that amuse social media. Sanya enjoys speaking with content creators, newsmakers and entrepreneurs to transform everyday moments into engaging, slice-of-life stories that resonate with readers. When she is not working, Sanya can be found curled up with a good book. Born and raised in Lucknow, she has spent the last several years in Delhi. She is deeply interested in animal welfare and now spends a lot of her time running after her destructive orange cat.Read More

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