TL;DR
Avataar AI launched Varya, an open-weight video model at $0.005 per second, 27 times cheaper than its rivals. Built under India’s AI mission, it represents Indian culture accurately.
Bengaluru-based Avataar AI has launched Varyaone of India’s first homegrown video AI models. It generates video at approximately $0.005 per second, or Rs.0.48. Founder Sravanth Aluru, a former Deutsche Bank investment banker and Microsoft and IIT Mumbai alumnus, says it’s 27 times cheaper than comparable open source video models.
The cost advantage comes from distillation. Avataar started with Alibaba’s Wan 2.2, a publicly available video generation model, and compressed its capabilities into a more agile version that runs in four steps instead of 50. The result is ten times faster generation at a fraction of the cost. Models like Veo, Kling, Luma, and Runway typically charge $0.10 or more per second.
Varya does not try to compete in quality with the frontier models of the United States and China. ByteDance’s Seedance, Kuaishou’s Kling, and Alibaba’s Wan are pushing motion realism and audio generation far beyond what Varya offers. The argument is scale and accessibility in a market of 1.4 billion people where cost competitiveness matters more than maximum performance.
What sets Varya apart is cultural specificity. Instead of adapting a model trained in the West, Avataar used curated data to train Varya to accurately represent Indian clothing, food, architecture, festivals, and everyday environments. Global models trained primarily on Western data sets consistently fail at this, producing culturally incorrect results that limit their usefulness for Indian businesses, education, and public services.
The model is open weight and will be published on India’s AIKosh portal, the government’s centralized repository for AI models and datasets. Avataar is one of the 12 startups selected for the IndiaAI Missiona roughly $1.2 billion initiative that gives select companies access to subsidized GPU computing in exchange for releasing their models publicly.
Avataar has raised $55 million from Peak XV Partners and Tiger Global. The company originally focused on creating video tools for e-commerce. Varya is its first foundation model, reflecting a broader trend of Indian startups building sovereign AI rather than renting Western infrastructure. Sarvam and BharatGen launched their own core models earlier this year under the same programme.
India’s AI strategy is different from that of Europe or China. It’s not about building the biggest model. You are trying to build models that work for your population at a price that your market can absorb. At $0.005 per second, Varya is testing whether a video model optimized for affordability and cultural relevance can achieve faster adoption than a technically superior but expensive Western alternative. In a country where AI startups are already being built to meet local needs At scale, the answer might well be yes.
