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

AI model production in India has been slow compared to the US, Europe and China. Only a few startups release models, and most of them are large language models or audio models. To encourage further development, the government launched India Artificial Intelligence Missiona roughly $1.2 billion initiative that — among other things — gives selected startups access to GPU-powered computing in exchange for publicly launching their models. One of 12 startups selected for the program, Amnesty international avatarlaunched a new video template called Varya that is designed to understand local context – such as identifying different festivals, food and clothing.

The startup backed by Peak XV, which focuses on Create e-commerce video toolshe did not build Varya from scratch. It started with Wan 2.2, a publicly available video generation model released by Alibaba, and used a technique called distillation — essentially compressing the model’s capabilities into a leaner, faster version that was optimized for Avataar’s specific use cases. The result is a model that plays in four steps instead of 50 for the Wan 2.2, producing video 10 times faster at a fraction of the cost.

To put this in concrete terms: Using an NVIDIA H200 GPU, the Varya can create a 5-second clip at 720p in 45 seconds, compared to 1230 seconds for the Wan 2.2.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the Varya is its price. The company plans to charge INR 0.48 ($0.005) per second for video on its hosted service — much cheaper than models like Veo, Kling, Luma and Runway, which typically charge $0.10 or more per second. That’s almost a 20x price difference.

“India is a video-first market. We see this across every major consumer internet product in India: video is trumping text. Current AI video models are too expensive for population-wide use in India. If video AI is going to reach students, educators, SMEs, creatives, enterprises and public services, costs will have to come down dramatically. Cost is the biggest lever for AI adoption in India,” Rajan Anandan, Managing Director, Peak XV, told TechCrunch.

Image and video creation models often miss cultural nuances and produce stereotypical or generic output – an issue TechCrunch has encountered I mentioned before. Avataar AI says it used curated data to train Varya to recognize cultural nuances including food, clothing, architecture and festivals.

The Varya will be released as an open-weight model in AI Kosh portal in India — the Indian government’s central repository for publicly available AI models and datasets — along with its training data, meaning developers can self-host it or modify it to meet their own needs. Avataar also plans to make the model available to its enterprise customers and says it is open to partnerships with video tools including Higgsfield and Adobe Firefly. Anyone can try it now on their website using text prompts or reference images.

The launch of Varia reflects a fundamental trade-off in India’s AI ambitions. Industry experts have observed that India can make its mark in the field of artificial intelligence through Create applications And strong Developer ecosystem Instead of competing on base models. There is a reason for this pragmatism: model development in India has been slower than in global competitors because No account and limited availability of high-quality data.

India’s AI mission is also part of a broader government drive to bridge this gap. Last year, it selected 12 startups – including Avataar AI – to develop AI models and power them with cost-effective computing. Earlier this year, IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said India aims to attract companies 200 billion dollars In investing in artificial intelligence by 2028 and more double Its GPU capacity within six months.