Principal Security Engineer

Bessemer Venture Partners launches hackathon to connect stellar engineering talent with category-defining AI startups. ANI | Updated: Aug 14, 2026 14:51 IST PNNBengaluru (Karnataka) [India], August 14: Bessemer Venture Partners has announced Bessemer Tech Catalyst, an AI Hackathon designed to connect India's next generation of AI talent with category-defining startups in their portfolio.The event will take place in Bengaluru on September 5 and will feature real-world AI problem statements from four of Bessemer's portfolio companies. These include Aivar (agentic AI systems and conversational AI products for enterprises); dCortex (system of action for airlines); MoveInSync (workplace mobility platform used by large enterprises to manage employee transportation at scale); and TBX (formerly TransBnk), which is building financial infrastructure that enables businesses to embed banking services into their products). Sarvam, the AI Partner for the event, will also host a special AI Lightning Round during the hackathon. The event is being organised in partnership with MetaMorph, which has worked closely with Bessemer Venture Partners to conceptualise and execute the first edition of Tech Catalyst.Participants will compete for a ₹7 lakh team prize pool and four Individual Spotlight Awards worth ₹25,000 each, along with additional rewards and exclusive goodies from the portfolio partners.Registrations for Bessemer Tech Catalyst are open until August 16, 2026, at 11:59 PM. Interested participants can register through the official event website.Speaking about the launch of the initiative, Nithin Kaimal, Partner, Bessemer Venture Partners, said: "Product-market fit gets you in the game. After that, the companies that win are the ones that out-hire on AI talent. Tech Catalyst is Bessemer's bet on making that happen, for our portfolio and for the ecosystem."The first edition is expected to bring together more than 300 engineers, developers and AI enthusiasts, creating opportunities for participants to solve real-world engineering challenges while engaging directly with founders, CTOs and engineering leaders from Bessemer's portfolio. Sharing why the initiative has become increasingly relevant, Deepa Papanna, Head of Talent & Community, Bessemer Venture Partners, said: "As demand for AI talent continues to outpace traditional hiring pipelines, we saw an opportunity to rethink how our portfolio companies find and engage the engineers who will shape their next phase of growth. Bessemer Tech Catalyst is our answer, a day where builders are judged on what they create, not just what's on paper. It gives our portfolio companies direct access to India's deep AI talent pool, and gives engineers a genuine platform to show what they can build.""Every aspect of Tech Catalyst has been intentionally designed to create meaningful engagement. From the problem statements and judging framework to founder interactions and participant experiences, the objective has been to create a platform where companies and talent can connect through demonstrated capability rather than conventional hiring processes."Added Swati Gupta, Associate Partner, MetaMorph. Speaking about the broader vision behind the event, Sanam Rawal, Founding Partner, MetaMorph, said:"The strongest hiring conversations rarely begin with a resume. They begin when people solve meaningful problems together. That's the experience we've designed with Bessemer Tech Catalyst by bringing founders, engineers, and AI talent into one room around challenges that reflect the realities of building AI-first companies."Each participating company will present an AI challenge inspired by real engineering problems their teams are solving today, giving participants an opportunity to work on practical use cases while interacting with founders and senior engineering leaders.In addition to the team prize pool and Individual Spotlight Awards, participants will have the opportunity to compete in Sarvam's AI Lightning Round and win exclusive partner rewards and event goodies throughout the day.With the first edition of Bessemer Tech Catalyst, Bessemer Venture Partners hopes to establish a long-term platform that connects ambitious AI talent with the founders and companies building the next generation of AI products in India.Interested candidates can register for Bessemer Tech Catalyst at https://hackculture.io/hackathons/bessemer-tech-catalyst(ADVERTORIAL DISCLAIMER: The above press release has been provided by PNN. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of the same.)

Sarvam Indus brings secure AI to Maharashtra government. Published on: August 12, 2026 Barry Elad Robert A. Lee As Featured In The Government of Maharashtra has approved Sarvam AI's Indus workspace for around 2,500 officials, the first step in a partnership that also covers voice agents and speech tools for public services. * The Government of Maharashtra approved Sarvam AI's Indus workspace for about 2,500 officials across state departments. * Indus runs on Sarvam's 105B sovereign model and works in 22 languages, including Marathi, on infrastructure kept entirely inside India. * The rollout follows Maharashtra's April 2026 creation of a dedicated AI department and extends a March letter of intent that also named OpenAI. The Government of Maharashtra has approved deployment of Indus, Sarvam AI's sovereign AI workspace, across its state departments. Around 2,500 officials will start using the platform in their daily work. Officials get access to deep research across policies and precedents, first drafts of notes and replies, translation and summarization of scheme and policy documents, and data analysis for patterns and exceptions, according to Sarvam's announcement of the partnership. Indus can also turn scanned records into searchable text, and it works across 22 Indian languages, including Marathi. The system runs on infrastructure located entirely within India, which the state can inspect directly. In March, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis announced letters of intent with OpenAI and Sarvam, alongside MoUs with IIT Bombay, one of India's top engineering institutes, and BharatGen. The state has since stood up an Electronics, Information Technology and Artificial Intelligence Department, created through a government notification dated April 21, 2026, covering AI policy, digital governance, data governance, cybersecurity and digital infrastructure. Maharashtra has also published an AI Policy 2026 and announced plans for an advanced State Data Centre in Nagpur, part of a broader build-out of India-based cloud capacity that includes Microsoft's largest India cloud region in Hyderabad. Bengaluru-based Sarvam opened Indus to users in limited beta in February, describing it as an interface for its Indian-language AI models. "True AI sovereignty means building the full stack of technology from the ground up," the company said at the time. Maharashtra skips the department-by-department pilot. Most government AI rollouts start small, with a single department testing a single use case before anyone else gets access. Maharashtra's approval covers the administration at once. Sarvam calls Maharashtra "one of the first states in India to make that commitment at this scale," against a backdrop of accelerating government and enterprise AI adoption. The sovereignty framing extends beyond India. Nvidia and Palantir unveiled a reference architecture for sovereign AI operating systems earlier this year, aimed at governments and regulated industries that want full ownership of their data, models and applications instead of capability rented from a foreign cloud. India runs its own version of that logic through the IndiaAI Mission, which selected Sarvam in 2025 to build a sovereign large language model, and now through state-level moves like Maharashtra's new AI department and its planned Nagpur data centre. Sarvam has the balance sheet to back a rollout this size. The company raised $234 million in the first close of a planned $300 million Series B in June, at a $1.5 billion valuation, in a round SQ Magazine covered in detail at the time. HCLTech (NSE: HCLTECH), the Indian IT services company, led with $150 million, and Bessemer Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners also took part. Sarvam separately secured $75 million from investors including Nvidia, Glade Brook, Gaja Capital, IndiGo Ventures and several individual backers, money the company says will fund research on its next models and expand compute and deployments across enterprise, developer and government customers. Sarvam says the underlying data stays within audited Indian infrastructure for the officials who will use Indus. Neither Sarvam nor Maharashtra has published details on what access or retention controls individual departments retain over the records they feed into the system, or how long that data is kept, questions worth asking before scanned files and draft replies start moving through it at scale. Indus is only the opening move. Sarvam says the wider partnership with Maharashtra will next bring voice agents for citizen outreach and speech technologies for public services, extending the same 22-language sovereign stack from officials' desks to the people they serve. This article has been reviewed and fact-checked by Robert A. Lee. SQ Magazine follows strict Publishing Principles and a documented Fact-Check Policy to ensure accuracy, transparency, and editorial independence across all content. Add SQ Magazine as a Preferred Source on Google for updates! References. Disclaimer: The content published on SQ Magazine is for informational and educational purposes only. Please verify details independently before making any important decisions based on its content.

Sarvam AI brings in Indic DiarBench to push speech recognition forward for Indian languages. 1 hour ago Highlights. * Indic DiarBench spans all 22 scheduled Indian languages * The open benchmark sits at about 108 hours of natural, multi-person speech * It measures ASR along with speaker diarization, together * The dataset covers gatherings, overlapping talks, and real-world audio situations Speech AI technology in Indian languages is becoming increasingly necessary because voice interfaces, AI assistants, transcription services, and chat-based apps keep growing across the country. Yet testing speech AI in day-to-day Indian conversations remains a major issue, since people almost never talk in cleanly separated, single-speaker environments, or so it seems. To close that gap, Sarvam AI, teamed up with AI4Bharat, has introduced Indic DiarBench. This open benchmark dataset is meant to evaluate automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speaker diarization in a combined way across all 22 scheduled Indian languages. Sarvam calls it the first open benchmark of its category, one that covers all 22 languages, with jointly labeled ASR and speaker attribution information, in one go. Why current speech benchmarks are not actually enough. Most conventional Automatic speech recognition (ASR) benchmarks focus on accuracy, like how well a system can turn spoken words into text. Speaker diarization instead tries to figure out who spoke when. But in everyday conversations, these things kind of blend together. Meetings, debates, podcasts, interviews, and customer-support calls don't stay neat. People interrupt each other, turns can flip fast, there's background noise, and more than one person can talk at the same time. So a Speech AI system might get the wording right but still tag it to the wrong person. Or the opposite could happen: it may separate speakers reasonably well, yet it can choke on transcribing short utterances or overlapping segments. Indic DiarBench is built for exactly this sort of combined pain by scoring transcription quality and speaker attribution together, using the same audio recordings. Indic DiarBench covers 108 hours across 22 Indian languages. The benchmark includes roughly 108 hours of natural, spontaneous speech covering all 22 scheduled Indian languages. The recordings include anywhere from two to nine speakers, with rapid exchanges, interruptions, backchannel reactions, and quite a bit of speech overlap. It also mixes acoustic settings, such as near-field meetings and far-field meetings, plus dialogues gathered from genuine online sources. The aim is to make the evaluation feel closer to how speech AI is used in practice, not just idealized lab conditions. The meeting subset takes about 81 hours. It involves 485 distinct speakers from 189 districts across both urban and rural India, adding more variation in dialects, personal backgrounds, and speaking habits. Why Indic DiarBench could improve Indian Speech AI. This release of Indic DiarBench could help researchers and developers put together speech systems that behave more consistently with India's linguistic variety, plus the everyday conversational ways people actually talk. Also, with stronger benchmarks, it becomes easier to line up or compare different ASR and diarization systems side by side, under fairly uniform conditions. That's very relevant for things like meeting transcription, customer service automation, voice assistants, call analytics, accessibility tools, and even multilingual AI agents. Sarvam's current speech work already leans into multilingual Indian speech, and it also covers code-mixing, plus speaker diarization. Its Saaras V3 speech recognition system supports 22 Indian languages, as well as English, showing that the company is still investing heavily in speech AI for India-language-first scenarios. Conclusion. Indic DiarBench tackles a big issue in speech AI research, specifically the absence of a more complete benchmark for checking both transcription and speaker attribution across India's very diverse languages. With roughly 108 hours of natural speech, coverage across all 22 scheduled Indian languages, real-world acoustic conditions, and human-verified speaker-attributed transcripts, this benchmark could become a crucial base for building better Indian-language voice technologies. Since AI is gradually moving from text interfaces to voice-style interaction, benchmarks that mirror how people speak day-to-day, not only how they speak in neat, controlled recordings, will matter more and more. Indic DiarBench is a move toward making Indian speech AI more precise, more inclusive, and genuinely useful in real-life situations. Follow us on: Latest Now