Sarvam has secured $234 million in a fresh funding round, valuing the company at $1.5 billion, it announced on Monday. The Bengaluru-based startup now joins the ranks of India’s AI unicorns, as governments and corporations increasingly push for tighter control over foundational AI technologies and the infrastructure that powers them.
A significant portion of the round—$150 million—comes from HCLTech, the IT arm of Indian conglomerate HCL Group, which also steps in as the lead strategic investor. Bessemer Venture Partners joined the round alongside returning backers Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners. Sarvam is targeting a total of $300 million for its Series B.
The new capital arrives more than two years after Sarvam’s earlier $41 million raise across seed and Series A rounds, and follows the company’s recent release of open-source models in 30-billion and 105-billion parameter versions earlier this year.
The funding also underscores a broader geopolitical shift: countries and companies racing to secure “sovereign AI” capabilities amid growing anxiety over dependence on foreign models and computing infrastructure.
Sarvam is positioning itself as a full-stack AI player—building everything from foundation models to inference infrastructure and enterprise-facing applications. Its systems are tuned for Indian languages and localized use cases, with deployments spanning banking, insurance, government services, and defense.
For HCLTech, the investment adds a strategic AI partner with deep enterprise reach. The plan is to fuse Sarvam’s model-building capabilities with HCLTech’s global client base, engineering capacity, and software ecosystem to deliver AI-driven solutions for both businesses and public-sector institutions.
The deal also reflects India’s growing importance in the global AI landscape. Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have repeatedly identified India as their second-largest market after the United States, fueled by rapid adoption across developers, enterprises, and everyday users.
Yet despite its massive AI consumption footprint, India still produces relatively few frontier model contenders. High compute costs and limited venture depth have made it difficult for startups to compete with heavily capitalized players in the U.S. and China, leaving Sarvam among a small group attempting to build domestic foundation models at scale.
The conversation around AI sovereignty intensified further after reports that Anthropic restricted access to its latest models—referred to as Fable 5 and Mythos 5—following a U.S. government directive tied to national security concerns. The move highlighted how tightly controlled access to cutting-edge AI systems has become.
With new funding in place, Sarvam plans to accelerate research into next-generation models focused on agentic systems, coding, and cybersecurity, while expanding its computing infrastructure to support wider deployment.
The company reports substantial traction already: its conversational AI platform handles more than 2 million interactions daily, its inference systems process around 10 million API calls per day, and its speech models transcribe over 500,000 hours of audio each month. Its document AI tools are being used to digitize tens of millions of pages of records.
These technologies are already operating at national scale. Sarvam’s multilingual voice agents have collected data from 17 million farmers for India’s Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, while a nationwide insurance campaign supported policy renewals for tens of millions of policyholders. In fintech, one large company is reportedly using Sarvam’s agentic platform to support a sales force of over 350,000 people.
Founded by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar—both formerly of AI4Bharat at IIT Madras, an initiative supported by tech veteran Nandan Nilekani—Sarvam continues to lean on India-centric AI research and language systems.
“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.”
