TL;DRAvataar AI launched Varya, an open-weight video model at $0.005/second, 27x cheaper than rivals. Built under India’s AI Mission, it renders Indian culture accurately.
Bangalore-based Avataar AI has launched Varya, one of India’s first homegrown video AI models. It generates video at roughly $0.005 per second, or 0.48 rupees. Founder Sravanth Aluru, a former Deutsche Bank investment banker and Microsoft and IIT Mumbai alum, says that is 27 times cheaper than comparable open-source video models.
The cost advantage comes from distillation. Avataar started with Alibaba’s Wan 2.2, a publicly available video generation model, and compressed its capabilities into a leaner version that runs in four steps instead of 50. The result is ten times faster generation at a fraction of the cost. Models like Veo, Kling, Luma, and Runway typically charge $0.10 or more per second.
Varya is not trying to compete with US and Chinese frontier models on quality. ByteDance’s Seedance, Kuaishou’s Kling, and Alibaba’s Wan are pushing motion realism and audio generation far beyond what Varya offers. The pitch is scale and accessibility in a market of 1.4 billion people where cost competitiveness matters more than peak performance.
