Sarvam has raised $234 million at a valuation of $1.5 billion, the company announced Monday. The Bangalore-based company has now become India’s latest AI unicorn, as governments and businesses seek greater control over critical artificial intelligence technologies and computing infrastructure.
Of this, $150 million will come from HCLTech, the IT subsidiary of Indian conglomerate HCL Group and the lead strategic investor in the round. Bessemer Venture Partners also participated, along with existing backers Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners. Sarvam hopes to raise a total of $300 million in Series B funding.
The investment comes more than two years after Sarvam raised $41 million in seed and Series A rounds, and follows the startup’s launch of 30 billion parameter and 105 billion parameter open source models earlier this year.
The new funding also reflects a broader push by countries and companies to develop sovereign AI capabilities amid growing concerns about access to advanced models and the computing infrastructure that powers them.
Sarvam is one of the few startups trying to build a full-stack AI business that spans model development, inference infrastructure, and enterprise applications. The company says its model is designed for Indian languages and use cases, and its products are deployed across sectors such as banking, insurance, government services and defence.
HCLTech’s investment makes Sarvam a well-placed strategic partner as it seeks to commercialize its technology. The plan is to combine Sarvam’s AI models with HCLTech’s corporate relationships, engineering talent, and software assets to build AI products for enterprises and governments.
Sarvam’s investment comes as India solidifies its position as one of the world’s most important AI markets. Both OpenAI and Anthropic say India is their second-largest market after the US due to its vast base of developers, businesses, and consumers deploying AI tools.
Despite its size as an AI consumer, India has produced few strong competitors in the race to develop frontier AI models. High computing costs and limited access to capital make it difficult for Indian startups to compete with cash-rich rivals in the U.S. and China, leaving Sarvam among a small number of companies trying to build a homegrown model.
The debate over AI sovereignty took on new urgency last week when Anthropic revoked access to its latest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, after the U.S. government ordered the company to stop its use by foreigners, citing national security concerns. The move highlighted that access to cutting-edge AI systems remains concentrated in a small number of overseas providers.
Sarvam said the new investment will fund research into next-generation AI models focused on agents, coding and cybersecurity applications, as well as expand access to computing infrastructure as it expands deployment across industries.
Sarvam said the company’s conversational AI platform currently handles more than 2 million interactions per day, and its inference platform handles approximately 10 million API calls each day. The company’s audio models transcribe more than 500,000 hours of audio each month, and its Document AI system is used to digitize more than 35 million pages of records.
These tools are being deployed at an increasingly large scale. The company said its multilingual voice agent has collected data from 17 million farmers for India’s Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare. In addition, the leading insurance company’s national voice campaign helped 45 million policyholders renew their coverage.
Beyond government and consumer applications, Sarvam said a leading fintech company is using its agent AI platform to support a sales force of more than 350,000 people.
The startup was founded by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, who previously worked at AI4Bharat, an Indian language AI research initiative at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, backed by technology veteran Nandan Nilekani.
“Our goal is to make this technology widely available in India and create significant value for all sectors of the population, small and medium-sized enterprises, corporates, and state and national governments,” Raghavan said. “We are in a position to help them adopt and innovate with AI.”
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