Avataar Launches Varya, India's First Distilled Video AI Model Under IndiaAI Mission

AI start-up Avataar has launched Varya, India's first distilled AI video model developed under the IndiaAI Mission. Backed by Peak XV, the start-up aims to make advanced video-generation technology affordable, accessible and relevant for India's next wave of users.

The launch took place at an event in New Delhi and was attended by Shri S Krishnan, Secretary of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), along with Avataar's leadership team.

Model Specifications

Varya is a 14-billion-parameter AI model that delivers video quality comparable to leading global models such as Alibaba's Wan 2.2 and Gemini Veo 3. However, it comes at a significantly lower cost. Video generation on Varya costs around 50 paise per second, compared to more than $0.10 per second charged by models such as Veo, Kling, Luma, and Runway. This makes Varya nearly 20 times more affordable.

According to Avataar, Varya has been built specifically for India's diverse cultural and regional contexts. The model is designed to understand and generate videos that reflect India's festivals, communities, food, clothing, public spaces, and everyday life. Whether it is a teacher creating visual lessons in a rural classroom, a small business producing product advertisements, or a citizen accessing information through video, Varya aims to help users turn simple ideas into engaging visual stories.

“India’s AI opportunity will not be defined only by the largest models. It will also be defined by the most efficient models,” said Sravanth Aluru, CEO and Co-Founder of Avataar. “Varya demonstrates that frontier-quality video AI can be made dramatically more efficient and accessible. For a country of 1.4 billion people, affordability is not a feature, it is a prerequisite. We believe the next billion stories, lessons, advertisements, services and experiences will be created through AI, and those capabilities must be available to everyone, not just a few.”

IndiaAI Mission Backing

Avataar was among the companies selected by the IndiaAI Mission to build indigenous foundation AI capabilities. Access to subsidized national AI compute infrastructure enabled the research that led to Varya, highlighting how public AI infrastructure can accelerate homegrown innovation.

Speaking at the launch, Secretary S Krishnan said, “The launch of one of the foundational models supported under the IndiaAI Mission marks a significant milestone in India's AI journey. Varya represents the kind of research-led capability building that we seek to enable. It is a proud moment that reflects our commitment to building indigenous AI capabilities and fostering a vibrant deep-tech ecosystem. Through strategic support for foundational models, we are enabling innovation at scale and creating the building blocks for the next generation of AI solutions. We look forward to further strengthening India's AI capabilities and advancing frugal innovation that is both world class and accessible at population scale.”

Developed with support from the IndiaAI Mission, Varya uses a distillation technique that reduces video generation from 50 steps to 4 steps, while maintaining comparable output quality. According to Avataar’s internal inference-cost benchmarks, Varya can generate video at ₹0.48 per second, making it upto 10x more cost-efficient than several leading global video models.

For India, where AI must work not just for millions but for more than a billion people, efficiency is not a technical detail. It is the foundation for inclusion.

The product experience is designed around a simple promise: Idea → Video → Story. Users can type an idea, upload an image, generate a video, and continue the story through additional clips. One prompt can become a lesson, an ad, a guide, a film or a memory.

“Affordable AI is inclusive AI,” said Sravanth Aluru. “What Avataar is building with Varya is important because it shifts the conversation from AI capability alone to AI accessibility. India has the talent, the market depth and the imagination to build AI products for population-scale use. Varya is a strong example of how Indian companies can compete globally, not by simply building bigger models, but by building more efficient, context-aware models that expand access.”

Avataar will also publish a technical report outlining Varya’s model architecture, distillation methodology and benchmarks.