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

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."

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)