About
We're on a mission to unlock the full potential of AI through innovative solutions that bridge the gap between human cognition and machine intelligence.
CognitiveLab
An Open Source First AI Research Lab Building from India, for the World.
CognitiveLab is an open-source first AI research and product lab founded in Bangalore in May 2023. Our core mission is to build impactful AI technology that solves real-world problems, with a strong focus on democratizing access and fostering innovation through open collaboration.
We develop cutting-edge models and tools that bridge the gap between research and practical applications across diverse domains. While we're known for excellence in multilingual AI (like Ambari and Project Nayana), our vision extends to creating widely adopted open-source software that transforms how organizations work with data and AI, like OmniParse (6,000+ GitHub stars) and our educational initiatives. Shortly after inception, we were selected for the Microsoft for Startups program.
To sustain our research and open-source contributions, CognitiveLab partners with businesses through consulting services, helping organizations of all sizes implement AI solutions that create tangible business value - from early-stage MVPs to enterprise-ready production systems.
Our Mission & Approach
CognitiveLab is dedicated to developing state-of-the-art AI models in India that create tangible impact globally. We prioritize open-source development to foster innovation, accelerate progress, and ensure accessibility. We balance our focus between critical multilingual/Indic projects and broadly applicable AI tools like data parsers and educational resources (e.g., AI Engineering Academy).
TL;DR - Our Major Achievements
- NayanaRevolutionary multilingual, multimodal model supporting 22 languages with SoTA OCR capabilities
- Omniparse6,000+ GitHub stars, 10,000+ monthly users, recognized as one of the fastest-growing open-source repositories
- AmbariIndia's first bilingual Kannada-English LLM, evaluated by NVIDIA and Microsoft, featured by Meta
- Meta GrantReceived Llama Impact Grant for advancing multilingual AI capabilities
Why CognitiveLab Exists
The Language Gap & Global Access
Despite India's linguistic diversity (22 official languages), AI development historically overlooked many regional languages, creating a digital divide for over 500 million non-English fluent speakers.
CognitiveLab aims to bridge this gap by building high-quality AI for underserved languages, ensuring technological equity while simultaneously creating solutions that solve real-world problems across industries and domains.
The Resource Imbalance & Open Source Need
Access to resources and datasets for cutting-edge AI was limited, often controlled by large entities with less focus on open community involvement and practical applications.
We champion an open-source approach to prove impactful AI can emerge from India with focused engineering and collaboration, empowering local researchers, developers, and organizations to build solutions that matter.
Our Broader Vision
Beyond addressing language barriers, CognitiveLab exists to tackle fundamental challenges in how AI technology is developed and deployed:
Practical Problem Solving
We're committed to developing AI tools that solve tangible business and social challenges - from enterprise data processing to educational access - rather than purely academic research.
Ethical & Inclusive Innovation
Our products are designed with inclusivity and accessibility as core principles, ensuring AI benefits aren't limited by language, geography, or economic status.
Community-Powered Advancement
We believe in creating platforms and tools that enable broader participation in AI development, allowing a diverse community to contribute to and benefit from technological progress.
How CognitiveLab Has Evolved
From a bootstrapped initiative in May 2023 to securing international grants, our journey reflects our growing impact. Here are some key milestones:
Founding & Microsoft for Startups
CognitiveLab founded as an open-source first research lab in Bangalore. Accepted into the Microsoft for Startups program around the same time.
Ambari Launch
Released India's first bilingual Kannada-English LLM (Ambari), achieving SoTA performance with limited resources.
Indic LLM Infrastructure
Launched tools and benchmarks like the Indic LLM Leaderboard to support Indic language AI development.
OmniParse Launch
Released OmniParse, an open-source data parsing tool that quickly gained traction (6,000+ GitHub stars).
Nayana OCR @ NAACL
First paper on Nayana OCR accepted at the prestigious NAACL conference workshop.
Meta Llama Impact Grant
Awarded the grant from Meta (Llama Impact Grant) to advance multilingual AI (Project Nayana). Public announcement on April 29, 2025.
Ongoing Research
Continuing work on Nayana, OmniParse, Indic infrastructure, and exploring new frontiers in open-source AI.
01
India's first bilingual Kannada-English LLM, set a new benchmark by being SoTA at the time of its launch. Trained with a modest budget of just $1,000 on Azure's infrastructure, it showcased how powerful AI can emerge even with limited resources.
References & Resources
02
An open-source tool designed to ingest and parse any type of data into a structured format. With 6,000+ GitHub stars and 10,000+ developers using it monthly, it's rapidly gaining traction in the AI space.
References & Resources
03
We've developed several tools to support Indic language AI development, including the India LLM Leaderboard, Indic Eval, and Indic Tokeniser.
References & Resources
04
A revolutionary multilingual, multimodal, multitask language model that supports 22 languages, including text, audio, and vision capabilities.
References & Resources
05
In recognition of our work, particularly with Project Nayana and the Indic LLM Leaderboard, CognitiveLab was awarded the prestigious Llama Impact Grant by Meta. This significant support, set to be publicly announced on April 29, 2025, will accelerate our efforts in advancing multilingual and multimodal AI for diverse languages.
How We'll Utilize the Grant
Advancing Project Nayana and Indic language AI
- Expand language coverage across all 22 official Indian languages
- Deepen multimodal capabilities connecting text, audio, and visual modalities
- Develop high-quality training data for low-resource languages
- Enhance the Indic Tokenizer to better handle morphological richness
- Create inference optimization techniques for deployment on constrained hardware
Why We Choose Open Source
CognitiveLab's commitment to open-source AI is deeply rooted in our foundational philosophy of democratizing artificial intelligence. We believe that open source has the most direct and widespread impact, benefiting both developers and end-users.
Accessibility for All
Open-source AI fundamentally aligns with our mission to make advanced AI technologies accessible across diverse communities, especially in regions where language barriers have historically limited technological inclusion.
Democratization of Innovation
By embracing open-source models, we're enabling developers, researchers, and organizations throughout India and beyond to build on powerful foundations without prohibitive costs.
Community-Powered Development
The vibrant ecosystem around open-source models has accelerated our progress through collaborative debugging, shared improvements, and collective problem-solving that proprietary approaches simply cannot match.
Indigenous Innovation Focus
Open-source allows us to develop locally relevant AI solutions that address uniquely Indian challenges while contributing to the global AI ecosystem.
Opportunities
Join our team or support our research
Join our Team
Application Process
Please fill out the form below to show interest in our open positions. We will review your application and get back to you within 2-3 weeks.
Support Our Research
If you like our research and would like to sponsor our projects and open source initiatives, please get in touch. Your sponsorship will greatly help us continue developing innovative solutions and advancing the field of AI.
- ✓Support cutting-edge AI research
- ✓Contribute to open source development
- ✓Help make AI accessible to everyone
If you have any questions, suggestions, or would like to discuss potential collaborations, please don't hesitate to reach out. I'd love to hear from you!Questions, ideas, or collaborations? Reach out—I'm all ears!
