AI4Bharat, a start-up backed by Microsoft, is raising $12 million from venture capital firms Peak XV and Lightspeed Venture to develop artificial intelligence-powered chatbots for Indian languages, according to three people familiar with the matter. The larger-than-usual seed funding round underscores the growing interest in generative AI, after OpenAI's ChatGPT dazzled users with its ability to engage in human-like conversations. AI4Bharat, which is also backed by the Indian government, has been developing AI models for speech recognition and translation.