Sarvam AI becomes India's newest unicorn with $234M HCLTech-led round

Sarvam AI, a Bengaluru-based startup founded by ex-AI4Bharat researchers Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, has become India's newest AI unicorn after raising $234 million in a Series B round at a $1.5 billion valuation. The round is led by HCLTech with a $150 million strategic investment, alongside Bessemer Venture Partners and existing backers Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners. The company plans to raise up to $300 million total. This follows earlier seed and Series A rounds of $41 million and the launch of open-source models with 30B and 105B parameters earlier this year. The funding reflects growing demand for sovereign AI capabilities as countries seek control over critical AI technologies and computing infrastructure.

Sarvam's full-stack AI platform spans model development, inference infrastructure, and enterprise applications tailored for Indian languages and use cases. Its conversational AI handles 2 million+ interactions daily, its inference platform processes 10 million API calls daily, its speech models transcribe 500,000+ hours of audio per month, and its document AI digitizes 35 million+ pages. Key deployments include a nationwide voice campaign for a leading insurer supporting 45 million policyholders, data collection from 17 million farmers for India's Ministry of Agriculture, and an agentic AI platform used by a large fintech for a 350,000-person sales force. Sarvam will use the new funds to develop next-gen models for agentic AI, coding, and cybersecurity, and to expand computing infrastructure.