While the world chased bigger GPUs and billion-dollar data centers, two brothers from India chose the harder path – making AI efficient, sovereign, and deployable inside India
An Indian AI infrastructure company solving what Big Tech ignores: cost, control, and
deployment.
They Didn’t Build India’s Biggest AI Model. They Built the Most Practical One.
Why This Indian Startup Refused to Chase Bigger GPUs — and Built Smarter AI Instead
Two founders, One Bet: Building AI That India Can Actually Deploy
When people talk about artificial intelligence today, the conversation usually sounds the same: bigger models, larger GPU clusters, billion-dollar data centers, and massive cloud bills.
India, like the rest of the world, has been using some of the most powerful AI systems ever built. But building them efficiently, affordably, and inside secure environments, especially within India’s real Infrastructure constraints, has been a very different challenge.
That gap is where 169Pi began.
Founded by Rajat Arya and Chirag Arya, 169Pi was never meant to be “just another AI startup.” From
At the start, the founders were less interested in chasing scale for headlines and more focused on a
harder question: what kind of AI can actually be deployed, owned, and trusted in the real world?
Choosing the harder path
At a time when most AI companies were racing to train ever-larger models using massive GPU clusters, the team at 169Pi made a contrarian decision. Instead of scaling hardware endlessly, they decided to optimize intelligence itself.
Their belief was simple but unpopular: AI adoption in countries like India wouldn’t be limited by talent or ambition — it would be limited by cost, control, and infrastructure.
Building AI that works only in expensive cloud environments wasn’t enough. What India needed was AI that could run efficiently, be deployed on-premise, and operate inside secure, sovereign systems where privacy and control matter as much as performance.
That decision shaped everything that followed.
Building intelligence, not just scale
The result of this approach is Alpie Core, a 32-billion-parameter AI model designed from the ground up to prioritize reasoning efficiency over brute-force computation.
While most large models run at full precision and require enormous infrastructure, Alpie Core operates entirely at 4-bit precision — drastically reducing compute requirements without sacrificing reasoning quality.
This wasn’t an easy choice. Running a model at such low precision introduces strict constraints, forcing the team to rethink training methods, optimization strategies, and evaluation standards. But those constraints became an advantage.
Despite operating at a fraction of the typical infrastructure cost, Alpie Core has demonstrated
global-level reasoning performance across multiple benchmarks — proving that smarter systems don’t always need bigger machines.
More importantly, the model was built to deploy, not just demo.
From benchmarks to real-world deployment
What truly sets 169Pi apart is that its work didn’t stop at benchmark results.
After successful pilots, the company became a strategic AI partner to ISRO, deploying AI systems designed to function inside secure, sovereign environments. These are settings where data sensitivity, cost efficiency, and operational control are non-negotiable — and where most generic cloud-based AI systems struggle to operate.
This transition from lab performance to real-world deployment marks a crucial shift. It signals a move away from AI as a showcase technology and toward AI as infrastructure — something that quietly works in the background, powering systems that institutions can rely on long-term.
A different vision for India’s AI future
169Pi’s story isn’t about chasing hype cycles or competing on marketing claims. It’s about building AI systems that align with India’s needs — scalable without excess, powerful without waste, and advanced without losing control.
As global AI continues to move from demos to decisions and deployments, the importance of
Efficiency-first, sovereign-ready AI will only grow.
169Pi represents a new kind of Indian AI company: one focused not on who builds the biggest model, but on who builds the most usable one.
Built in India.
Designed for real deployment.
And focused on long-term AI infrastructure, not short-term hype.
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