Sarvam secures $234M from HCLTech to become India's newest AI unicorn

Sarvam announced on Monday that it has raised $234 million at a valuation of $1.5 billion. The Bengaluru-based startup is now India’s newest AI unicorn, as governments and companies increasingly seek greater control over critical artificial intelligence technologies and computing infrastructure.

HCLTech, the IT subsidiary of Indian conglomerate HCL Group and the lead strategic investor in this round, is contributing $150 million of that total. Bessemer Venture Partners also joined the round, alongside existing backers Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners. Sarvam aims to raise a total of $300 million for its Series B.

The investment comes more than two years after Sarvam raised $41 million across its seed and Series A rounds, and follows the startup’s earlier launch this year of open-source models with 30 billion and 105 billion parameters.

This new funding also reflects a broader push by countries and companies to build sovereign AI capabilities, amid growing concerns about access to advanced models and the computing infrastructure that powers them.

Sarvam is one of a handful of startups trying 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, and 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 works to commercialize its technology. The plan is to combine Sarvam’s AI models with HCLTech’s enterprise relationships, engineering workforce, and software assets to create AI products for businesses and governments.

Sarvam’s funding comes at a time when India is cementing its position as one of the world’s most important AI markets. OpenAI and Anthropic have both described India as their second-largest market after the U.S., driven by the country’s large 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 make 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 per 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.”