Indian startup Avataar AI has unveiled Varya, an innovative video generation model engineered for the specific demands of the Indian market. The model promises significantly faster video creation at a fraction of the cost of existing global alternatives, while also incorporating a crucial understanding of local cultural nuances.
Varya was developed not from scratch, but by distilling Alibaba's publicly available Wan 2.2 model. This process compresses the original model's capabilities, resulting in a leaner, faster version optimised for Avataar's e-commerce video tools. The company states that Varya can generate video ten times faster than Wan 2.2, completing a five-second 720p clip in just 45 seconds, compared to 1,230 seconds for the original model on an NVIDIA H200 GPU.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Varya is its affordability. Avataar AI plans to charge approximately £0.004 (0.48 Indian Rupees) per second for video generation on its hosted service. This is a substantial reduction compared to major international models such as Veo, Kling, Luma, and Runway, which typically cost upwards of £0.08 per second, representing roughly a 20-fold price difference.
This cost-effectiveness is seen as a critical factor for widespread AI adoption in India, a country described as a 'video-first market'. Rajan Anandan, managing director at Peak XV, highlighted that current AI video models are too expensive for population-scale use in India, suggesting that lower costs are essential for AI to reach students, teachers, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), creators, and public services.
A key differentiator for Varya is its ability to understand local context. Avataar AI has trained the model using curated data to recognise Indian cultural nuances, including various festivals, food, clothing, and architecture. This addresses a common issue with global image and video generation models that often produce generic or stereotypical outputs, failing to capture specific cultural details.
Varya's launch aligns with the Indian government's ambitious India AI Mission, a roughly $1.2 billion initiative designed to foster domestic AI development. Avataar AI is one of 12 startups selected for the programme, which provides access to subsidised GPU compute in exchange for public model releases. Varya will be released as an open-weight model on India's AI Kosh portal, a centralised repository for public AI models and datasets, along with its training data. This move aims to empower developers to self-host or modify the model for their specific requirements, further accelerating India's AI ecosystem.