Sarvam AI secures $234M Series B, becomes India's newest AI unicorn at $1.5 billion valuation

Sarvam becomes India's newest AI unicorn with $234 million funding round led by HCLTech

Sarvam has raised $234 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, the company announced on Monday. The Bengaluru-based company is now India's newest AI unicorn, as governments and companies seek greater control over critical artificial intelligence technologies and computing infrastructure. $150 million of that money will come from HCLTech, the IT subsidiary of Indian conglomerate HCL Group and lead strategic investor in the round. Bessemer Venture Partners also participated alongside existing backers Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners. Sarvam hopes to raise a total of $300 million for its Series B round. The investment comes more than two years after Sarvam raised $41 million across its seed and Series A rounds, and follows the startup's launch of its open-source models in 30-billion- and 105-billion-parameters earlier this year. The new funding also reflects a broader push by countries and companies to develop sovereign AI capabilities amid growing concerns over access to advanced models and the computing infrastructure that powers them. Sarvam is among a handful of startups attempting to build a full-stack AI business, spanning model development, inference infrastructure, and enterprise applications. The startup says its models are designed for Indian languages and use cases, while its products are being deployed across sectors including banking, insurance, government services, and defense. HCLTech's investment gives Sarvam a deep-pocketed strategic partner as it seeks to commercialize its technology. The plan is to combine Sarvam's AI models with HCLTech's enterprise relationships, engineering workforce, and software assets to build AI products for businesses and governments. Sarvam's investment comes as India cements its position as one of the world's most important AI markets. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have described India as their second-largest market after the U.S., driven by the country's vast base of developers, enterprises, and consumers adopting AI tools. Despite its scale as an AI consumer, India has produced few serious contenders in the race to develop frontier AI models. High computing costs and limited access to capital have made it difficult for Indian startups to compete with well-funded rivals in the U.S. and China, leaving Sarvam among a small group of companies attempting to build homegrown foundation models. The debate over AI sovereignty gained fresh urgency last week when Anthropic disabled access to its latest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, after the U.S. government ordered the company to suspend their use by any foreign national, citing national security concerns. The move highlighted how access to cutting-edge AI systems remains concentrated among a small number of overseas providers. With the fresh investment, Sarvam said it would fund research into its next-generation AI models focused on agentic, coding, and cybersecurity applications, while also expanding access to computing infrastructure as it scales deployments across industries. Sarvam said its conversational AI platform now handles more than 2 million interactions a day, while its inference platform processes roughly 10 million API calls daily. Its speech models transcribe more than 500,000 hours of audio each month, and its document AI systems are being used to digitize more than 35 million pages of records. Those tools are increasingly being deployed at scale. The company said its multilingual voice agents have collected data from 17 million farmers for India's Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare. Additionally, a nationwide voice campaign for a leading insurer helped support policy renewals for 45 million policyholders. Beyond government and consumer-facing applications, Sarvam said a large fintech company is using its agentic 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 ambition is to diffuse this technology widely in India, creating significant value across sectors for citizens, small businesses, enterprises, and state and central governments," Raghavan said. "We are positioned to both help them adopt and innovate on AI."

Backed by HCL Sarvam AI Hits $1.5B Unicorn Valuation

India-based Sarvam AI finally joins the Unicorn club after receiving fresh investment worth $151 million, which translates to around Rs. 1427 crores. The AI unicorn has announced during the announcement of Series B funding, taking the Sarvam AI valuation to over $1.5 billion after the funding round ends. * Make Telecom Talk My Trusted Source The Rise of Sovereign Tech: How Sarvam AI Attracted a Massive $151 Million Investment The Bengaluru-based startup is among the emerging Indian artificial intelligence companies focusing on building generative AI infrastructure, especially for India. The company has been known for its flagship AI models, which have been trained to its core to understand the culture, language, and code-mixing (e.g., mixing Hindi and English) unique to Indian speakers. Sarvam AI has different AI models that help in improving business efficiency. The company has built 4 flagship AI models - Sarvam 105B, Sarvam 30B, Sarvam Vision, and Sarvam Edge. Talking about their capabilities, the Sarvam 105B is built and trained under 105 billion parameters for complex reasoning and building agentic workflows. Also Read: Airtel Shareholders Approve Deal to Increase Airtel Africa Stake to Nearly 79% Then there is a 30B parameter LLM model called the Sarvam 30B, which is optimized towards real-time deployment. Sarvam Vision LLM works similarly to Google's Gemini and OpenAI's ChatGPT, where the 3 billion parameter LLM supports a state-space vision-language model designed for optical character recognition (OCR) and document digitization.

Sarvam Raises $234 Million in Series B, Achieves $1.5 Billion Unicorn Valuation

Sarvam builds across the AI stack: training and inference infrastructure, frontier model research, and a go-to-market motion spanning enterprises, developers, and government. Sarvam announced that it has raised $234 million in the first close of its $300 million Series B at a post-money valuation of $1.5 billion. HCLTech and Bessemer Venture Partners invested in the round, with continued support from existing investors Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners. Sarvam builds across the AI stack: training and inference infrastructure, frontier model research, and a go-to-market motion spanning enterprises, developers, and government. The investment will fund Sarvam's continued research on training its next frontier model for agentic, coding, and cybersecurity use-cases, as well as access to compute at scale to expand its forward-deployed motion across key verticals. "We are clear that research-led innovation to create AI that works at India's scale is a very large opportunity. That means models that understand our voices, read our documents, and serve intelligence at a cost every enterprise and government can afford. Building on this template, we are innovating on a full-stack offering for enterprises to own and operate their own sovereign AI," said Pratyush Kumar, Co-Founder of Sarvam. HCLTech will invest $150M as the lead strategic investor in this round. By combining its deep enterprise transformation expertise, trusted global client relationships, data and other software IP, and engineering depth, HCLTech would accelerate Sarvam's goal of building a powerful, end-to-end sovereign AI ecosystem for India and beyond. C Vijayakumar, CEO & Managing Director of HCLTech said, "Our investment in Sarvam marks a significant step toward building India's trusted and globally competitive AI ecosystem. By bringing together Sarvam's research in AI models with HCLTech's global presence, we are creating a differentiated full-stack AI platform for enterprises and governments, strengthening our ability to deliver secure, scalable, and responsible AI solutions." Sarvam's research has shipped at pace. In the last few months, it has released foundational models, all trained from scratch in India. Sarvam 105B matches or outperforms larger reasoning models on knowledge, reasoning, and agentic benchmarks, while Sarvam 30B is optimised for the edge, running on consumer hardware. Sarvam Vision, built for handwriting and Indian-language records, is being used to digitise over 35 million pages from insurance forms to legacy land records. Sarvam's speech models work in India's complex settings, transcribing over half a million hours of audio each month. Sarvam's products are rapidly scaling, focused on the verticals where the stakes are highest: banking, insurance, gov tech, and defence. Sarvam's conversational platform now handles over 2 million interactions a day, with usage doubling in the last two months. Sarvam's agentic platform is scaling rapidly. A leading fintech powers its 350,000-strong sales force with a sales enablement platform that is delivering demonstrable gains. Sarvam's models are also being adopted by developers served on its inference platform in India which processes 10 million API calls daily, with usage tripling in the last three months. Sarvam's deployments are also creating impact at population scale. With multilingual voice agents, Sarvam's platform collected high-quality data from 17 million farmers providing deep insights to the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmer's Welfare. For one of India's leading insurance providers, a nationwide voice campaign supported low cost policy renewals for 45 million policyholders. "Our ambition is to diffuse this technology widely in India, creating significant value across sectors for citizens, small businesses, enterprises, and state and central governments. We are positioned to both help them adopt and innovate on AI. The partnership with HCLTech provides a unique example of an Indian corporate helping build foundational strength in AI," said Vivek Raghavan, Co-Founder of Sarvam. "Sarvam is building and deploying India's sovereign AI platform - serving 1.4 billion citizens, mission-critical sectors, and large enterprises. Pratyush and Vivek have brought together the rare combination of research depth, engineering talent, and institutional trust to meet India's voice and agentic needs, and we are proud to partner with them," said Pankaj Mitra, Partner, Bessemer Venture Partners.

Sarvam raises $234 million in first close of $300 million Series B at $1.5 billion valuation

Sarvam today announced that it has raised $234 million in the first close of its $300 million Series B at a post-money valuation of $1.5 billion. HCLTech and Bessemer Venture Partners invested in the round, with continued support from existing investors Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners. Sarvam builds across the AI stack: training and inference infrastructure, frontier model research, and a go-to-market motion spanning enterprises, developers, and government. The investment will fund Sarvam's continued research on training its next frontier model for agentic, coding, and cybersecurity use-cases, as well as access to compute at scale to expand its forward-deployed motion across key verticals. "We are clear that research-led innovation to create AI that works at India's scale is a very large opportunity. That means models that understand our voices, read our documents, and serve intelligence at a cost every enterprise and government can afford. Building on this template, we are innovating on a full-stack offering for enterprises to own and operate their own sovereign AI," said Pratyush Kumar, Co-Founder of Sarvam. HCLTech will invest $150M as the lead strategic investor in this round. By combining its deep enterprise transformation expertise, trusted global client relationships, data and other software IP, and engineering depth, HCLTech would accelerate Sarvam's goal of building a powerful, end-to-end sovereign AI ecosystem for India and beyond. C Vijayakumar, CEO & Managing Director of HCLTech said, "Our investment in Sarvam marks a significant step toward building India's trusted and globally competitive AI ecosystem. By bringing together Sarvam's research in AI models with HCLTech's global presence, we are creating a differentiated full-stack AI platform for enterprises and governments, strengthening our ability to deliver secure, scalable, and responsible AI solutions." Sarvam's research has shipped at pace. In the last few months, it has released foundational models, all trained from scratch in India. Sarvam 105B matches or outperforms larger reasoning models on knowledge, reasoning, and agentic benchmarks, while Sarvam 30B is optimised for the edge, running on consumer hardware. Sarvam Vision, built for handwriting and Indian-language records, is being used to digitise over 35 million pages from insurance forms to legacy land records. Sarvam's speech models work in India's complex settings, transcribing over half a million hours of audio each month. Sarvam's products are rapidly scaling, focused on the verticals where the stakes are highest: banking, insurance, gov tech, and defence. Sarvam's conversational platform now handles over 2 million interactions a day, with usage doubling in the last two months. Sarvam's agentic platform is scaling rapidly. A leading fintech powers its 350,000-strong sales force with a sales enablement platform that is delivering demonstrable gains. Sarvam's models are also being adopted by developers served on its inference platform in India which processes 10 million API calls daily, with usage tripling in the last three months. Sarvam's deployments are also creating impact at population scale. With multilingual voice agents, Sarvam's platform collected high-quality data from 17 million farmers providing deep insights to the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmer's Welfare. For one of India's leading insurance providers, a nationwide voice campaign supported low cost policy renewals for 45 million policyholders. "Our ambition is to diffuse this technology widely in India, creating significant value across sectors for citizens, small businesses, enterprises, and state and central governments. We are positioned to both help them adopt and innovate on AI. The partnership with HCLTech provides a unique example of an Indian corporate helping build foundational strength in AI," said Vivek Raghavan, Co-Founder of Sarvam. "Sarvam is building and deploying India's sovereign AI platform - serving 1.4 billion citizens, mission-critical sectors, and large enterprises. Pratyush and Vivek have brought together the rare combination of research depth, engineering talent, and institutional trust to meet India's voice and agentic needs, and we are proud to partner with them," said Pankaj Mitra, Partner, Bessemer Venture Partners.

Sarvam Raises $234 Million, Becomes AI Unicorn Amid Anthropic Curbs

Sarvam has become India's newest artificial intelligence (AI) unicorn, raising $234 million in the first close of a $300 million Series B round that values the startup at $1.5 billion. It now joins Krutrim as one of only two Indian AI unicorns in a market where it also faces Reliance Jio's $120 billion AI commitment and the IT majors pivoting to AI-first strategies. The investors: * HCLTech leads the round with a $150 million investment, acquiring a 10.46% stake for Rs 1,427.25 crore. * Bessemer Venture Partners has joined the round alongside existing investors Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners. * Lightspeed Venture Partners has sat out the round despite leading Sarvam's earlier funding round. Sarvam has not disclosed a timeline for closing the remaining $66 million. The startup will use the capital to fund its next-generation frontier model for agentic AI, coding, and cybersecurity use cases, as well as to secure compute capacity at scale. It plans to expand deployments across four verticals: banking, insurance, government technology, and defence. The valuation reflects a clear bet on future scale. Sarvam reported revenue of Rs 45.1 crore in 2025-26, compared with a previous valuation of around $196 million in 2025. The company says usage is scaling rapidly. Its conversational platform now handles more than 2 million interactions a day, doubling in two months, while its inference platform processes 10 million application programming interface (API) calls daily, tripling in three months. Its government pipeline is also widening. The company signed sovereign AI infrastructure Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) with Tamil Nadu for the Digital Sangam research park with IIT Madras and with Odisha for a 50-megawatt (MW) compute facility, both in February 2026. The raise marks a turnaround for Sarvam. The government selected the startup in April 2025 to build India's first sovereign Large Language Model (LLM) under the IndiaAI Mission, but it faced scepticism over its pace of development and low download numbers. Critics also pointed out that its May 2025 model, Sarvam-M, was built by fine-tuning a foreign foundation model with Indian data rather than being developed from scratch. Sarvam responded to those concerns at the AI Impact Summit in February 2026 by launching two models trained from scratch on Indian-language datasets. The funding further sharpens India's sovereign AI push. It comes just days after the United States (US) government blocked foreign nationals from accessing Anthropic's latest models, deepening concerns about reliance on overseas providers. Sarvam co-founder Pratyush Kumar linked the funding round directly to that development, writing on X: "You should not confuse access with ownership, or adoption itself as advantage." The government is funding Sarvam as one of 12 organisations building foundational models under the IndiaAI Mission, positioning it as a full-stack Indian alternative spanning models, infrastructure, and applications.

Sarvam Becomes India's Newest AI Unicorn With $234 Million Funding Led by HCLTech

Bengaluru-based AI startup Sarvam has joined the unicorn club after raising $234 million in a funding round led by HCLTech, which valued the company at $1.5 billion. The investment underscores India's efforts to build domestic artificial intelligence capabilities amid rising concerns over dependence on foreign AI providers. HCLTech is contributing $150 million as the lead strategic investor; other supporters include Bessemer Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, and Peak XV Partners. it intends to increase the total size of the Series B round to $300 million.

India's HCLTech to buy 10.5% stake in Sarvam AI, valuing startup at $1.5 billion

June 15 (Reuters) - India's HCLTech said on Monday it will acquire a 10.5% stake in domestic generative AI startup Sarvam AI for 14.27 billion rupees ($150.7 million) in cash, leading the firm's Series B round as a strategic investor. Sarvam was valued at $1.5 billion in the round, which raised $234 million in its first close out of a targeted $300 million, the startup said. o HCLTech said it will acquire 41,421 equity shares in the startup and fund its research and development aimed at training next-generation models for agentic AI, coding and cybersecurity use cases. o The investment will allow the Indian IT services company to develop specific language models and AI solutions for its global client base, and accelerate the development of sovereign AI solutions for governments and regulated industries, HCLTech added. o The round was co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with continued participation from existing investors Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners, Sarvam said. o In 2024, Microsoft partnered with the Indian startup to support voice-based generative AI applications, without disclosing financial details. ($1 = 94.7100 Indian rupees) (Reporting by Urvi Dugar in Bengaluru; Editing by Vijay Kishore)