India is making waves in the AI landscape with the launch of its first enterprise-grade pruned AI coding model, built from the ground up for sectors that demand maximum data security and privacy. VibeStudio, a Chennai-based AI lab, has engineered this solution specifically for banks, healthcare institutions, educational organizations, and government agencies that run on secure, isolated networks.
Breaking the Mold: Why This Model Matters
As international AI development is increasingly dominated by giant Chinese models like DeepSeek and GLM, India needed a homegrown, privacy-forward alternative. VibeStudio answered this call with a model that’s not just secure, but also highly efficient and open for businesses aiming to keep their data on-premise and air-gapped from external networks.
Inside the Model: Pruning for Performance
VibeStudio’s engineering team developed a new open-source pruning method named THRIFT (Targeted Hierarchical Reduction for Inference and Fine-Tuning). Using THRIFT, they managed to shrink the popular MiniMax-M2 model from a massive 250 billion to 192 billion parameters, retaining top-notch coding performance while slashing resource consumption. The most remarkable part: this overhaul was achieved with just $200 worth of compute—the kind of efficiency that sets a new industry benchmark.
Real-World Deployments and Early Success
Major Indian enterprises are already seeing the impact. IppoPay, a leader in fintech and UPI services, and GUVI, an HCL-backed edtech player with over 3.5 million learners, have deployed VibeStudio’s AI for secure, automated coding. The model quickly caught the community’s attention, racking up 10,000 downloads on Hugging Face and contributing to VibeStudio’s total of 150,000 downloads across other releases.
Collaboration and Future Roadmap
Adding to the momentum, Intel has selected VibeStudio for its accelerator program. This partnership will optimize the AI suite for the upcoming Panther Lake processors, further enhancing India’s independent AI ecosystem both in hardware and software.
VibeStudio isn’t slowing down. They’re now working to prune the Kimi K2 Thinking model by 50 percent, pushing the boundaries for on-device and offline AI applications—vital for organizations requiring both performance and airtight security.
The Big Picture
Founded by tech entrepreneur Arjun Reddy, and incubated at ITEL Foundation under Padma Shri Professor Ashok Jhunjhunwala, VibeStudio’s mission is clear: give India the tools to control its digital destiny with sovereign, privacy-centric AI. As more companies turn to AI for coding automation, VibeStudio’s solution promises not just innovation, but also a future where data sovereignty and operational efficiency go hand in hand.
