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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, becoming India’s newest AI unicorn. The Bengaluru-based startup announced the Series B round on Monday, with $150 million coming from lead strategic investor HCLTech, the IT subsidiary of HCL Group. Bessemer Venture Partners also participated, along with existing backers Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners. Sarvam aims to raise a total of $300 million in the round. The funding comes over two years after it raised $41 million across seed and Series A rounds, following the launch of its open-source models in 30 billion and 105 billion parameters earlier this year. The investment reflects a global push by governments and companies to develop sovereign AI capabilities amid concerns over access to advanced models and computing infrastructure. Sarvam is building a full-stack AI business spanning model development, inference infrastructure, and enterprise applications, with models designed for Indian languages and use cases across banking, insurance, government services, and defense. HCLTech’s partnership will combine Sarvam’s AI models with its enterprise relationships, engineering workforce, and software assets. India is a key AI market, with OpenAI and Anthropic calling it their second-largest after the U.S. However, few Indian startups compete in frontier AI due to high computing costs and limited capital. Concerns over AI sovereignty were heightened after Anthropic disabled its latest models for foreign nationals following a U.S. government order. Sarvam will use the fresh investment to fund research into next-generation AI models for agentic, coding, and cybersecurity applications, and expand computing infrastructure. Its conversational AI platform handles over 2 million interactions daily, its inference platform processes 10 million API calls, speech models transcribe 500,000 hours of audio monthly, and document AI systems digitize 35 million pages. Multilingual voice agents have collected data from 17 million farmers for India’s Ministry of Agriculture, a voice campaign helped renew policies for 45 million policyholders, and a fintech uses its agentic platform to support 350,000 salespeople. Founded by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, formerly of AI4Bharat at IIT Madras, the startup aims to "diffuse this technology widely in India."