CognitiveLab Wins Meta Grant for Multilingual AI Project Nayana

Meta has recently announced the recipients of its 2024 Llama Impact Grants, spotlighting global innovators using open-source large language models (LLMs) to address critical social challenges. Among this year’s honorees is India-based CognitiveLab, recognized for its groundbreaking project Nayana, which is transforming AI accessibility for linguistically diverse communities. The Llama Impact Grant will help scale Nayana’s multilingual, multimodal capabilities—supporting over 22 languages and aiming to reach more than three billion people worldwide.

Launched in 2023, the Llama Impact Grants support the innovative use of Meta’s open-source models—Llama 2, Llama 3, and the latest Llama 4—for projects with measurable social impact.

Nayana: Democratizing AI Through Language and Accessibility

Headquartered in Bengaluru, CognitiveLab is an open-source-first AI research lab dedicated to developing accessible, transparent, and community-powered technologies. It has been at the forefront of open infrastructure in India, launching initiatives like the Indic LLM Leaderboard and releasing widely adopted benchmark datasets.

Developed by CognitiveLab, Nayana is a multilingual, multimodal, multitask language model that harnesses the power of Meta’s Llama models to automate document and image processing across a wide range of languages—including several low-resource Indic languages. Featuring integrated text, vision, and speech capabilities, Nayana has already outperformed industry standards in optical character recognition (OCR) for 10 Indian languages.

Speaking on the announcement, Shivnath Thukral, Vice President and Head of Public Policy at Meta India, said,“Open-source AI is a powerful tool to bridge digital divides, especially in a diverse country like India. With the 2024 Llama Impact Grant, we’re proud to support the Nayana project. Its work embodies the spirit of open innovation—making advanced AI usable for billions of people. Llama 4 was designed with accessibility, flexibility, and scalability at its core—and we’re excited to see how CognitiveLab will leverage this foundation to drive real-world impact.”

Shashi Kumar, Founder of CognitiveLab, added,“Our vision is to democratize AI in a way that’s inclusive and equitable. The Llama Impact Grant enables us to supercharge our efforts with Nayana—expanding language coverage, enhancing multimodal capabilities, and building high-quality training datasets for low-resource language communities. Open-source and Llama have empowered us to build world-class systems like Ambari and Nayana with minimal resources. This grant is a milestone in our journey to build impactful, indigenous AI solutions for the global south.”

With the new funding, CognitiveLab plans to expand language support, improve multimodal integration, and develop deployment tools optimized for low-resource settings. The lab will also release new speech-text-image datasets, enhance its Indic tokenizer, and set new benchmarks for multilingual AI systems through community-driven collaboration.

With over 1 billion global downloads and more than 85,000 derivative models, the Llama family—now in its fourth generation—has become the backbone for a growing ecosystem of socially impactful AI tools. India remains one of the most active markets for Llama adoption, where innovators like CognitiveLab are using open-source AI to solve complex local challenges and foster inclusive digital growth.