Open-source AI pioneer recognized for challenging tech giants with community-owned artificial intelligence
BENGALURU, IN / ACCESS Newswire / October 8, 2025 / Sentient, the AI unicorn that raised an $85M seed round to advance open-source AGI, has been awarded “AI Startup of the Year” at the prestigious Minsky Awards 2025, India’s most distinguished AI recognition ceremony held at Cypher 2025 in Bengaluru.
The award recognizes Sentient’s work in democratizing AI development through its open-source approach that directly challenges the monopolistic control of AI by major players like OpenAI, xAI, Google, and Anthropic. The company was specifically lauded for “fighting the privatization of AI by developing a fully open, community-built alternative” during the awards ceremony.
“We’re working to ensure that the most advanced AGI serves humanity as a whole – not corporations,” said Himanshu Tyagi, Co-founder of Sentient and Professor at the Indian Institute of Science. “This recognition from the Minsky Awards reinforces our commitment to building open, transparent AI systems that benefit everyone.”
Most recently, Sentient has redefined AI reasoning capabilities with its open-source framework, ROMA, which has outperformed all existing model platforms. ROMA (Recursive Open Meta-Agent) is a new, open deep research architecture that orchestrates simpler agents and tools to solve complex problems. On the FRAMES benchmark for multi-step reasoning, ROMA Search achieved an industry-leading 81.7% accuracy, significantly surpassing competitors like GPT-4o Search (65.6%) and Perplexity Sonar Pro (44.4%). Furthermore, on the challenging SEAL-0 benchmark for complex, multi-source reasoning, ROMA established its dominance with 45.6% accuracy, beating the previous top performer, Kimi Researcher (36%), and more than doubling the score of Gemini 2.5 Pro (19.8%). This powerful framework is available on GitHub, where it was the #1 trending repository for two weeks since its launch.
Co-founded by Polygon’s Sandeep Nailwal, Princeton University professor Pramod Viswanath, and Himanshu Tyagi, Sentient’s mission is to ensure that AGI is open-source and not controlled by any single entity. The company’s $85 million seed round was co-led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, and Framework Ventures.
The Minsky Awards, held annually at Cypher, India’s largest AI conference with over 5,000 attendees, recognizes excellence across 23 AI categories. Sentient’s win in the highly competitive “AI Startup of the Year” category highlights the company’s rapid emergence as a challenger to established AI giants.
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SOURCE: Sentient AI
