Sarvam Becomes India’s Latest AI Unicorn after $234 Million Funding Round
The round values Sarvam at $1.5 billion and comes as India pushes to build homegrown AI models and infrastructure.
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Image Credit- Chetan Jha/ MIT Sloan Management Review India
Sarvam has raised $234 million in the first close of its Series B round, valuing the Bengaluru-based artificial intelligence startup at $1.5 billion and making it India’s latest AI unicorn.
HCL Technologies Ltd led the round as a strategic investor with a $150 million investment, giving it a 10.5% stake in Sarvam.
Bessemer Venture Partners also invested, while existing backers Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners participated. Sarvam plans to raise $300 million in total under the round.
The investment is one of the largest funding rounds for an Indian AI startup and comes as governments and companies seek greater control over AI models, data and computing infrastructure.
Founded by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, Sarvam is building foundation models, inference infrastructure and enterprise AI applications. The company focuses on Indian languages and domestic use cases, with deployments across banking, insurance, government technology and defense.
For HCLTech, the investment is a strategic bet on expanding its AI capabilities. The IT services firm said the partnership will help it develop specialized language models and AI solutions for its global customer base while supporting sovereign AI initiatives for governments and regulated industries.
“Our investment in Sarvam marks a significant step toward building India’s trusted and globally competitive AI ecosystem,”said C Vijayakumar, CEO & MD, HCLTech.
The funding comes at a time when countries and enterprises are increasingly seeking greater control over AI technologies and the infrastructure required to run them. Concerns around dependence on a handful of overseas model providers have intensified in recent months.
India has emerged as one of the fastest-growing markets for AI adoption. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have identified the country as their second-largest market after the United States. Yet despite strong demand, India has produced relatively few companies developing frontier AI models, largely because of the high costs associated with training and operating them.
Sarvam plans to use the new capital to expand research into next-generation AI models, with a focus on agentic systems, coding assistants and cybersecurity applications. The company also intends to invest in computing infrastructure as it scales deployments across industries.
“We are clear that research-led innovation to create AI that works at India’s scale is a very large opportunity,” co-founder Pratyush Kumar said in an official release.
The startup said its conversational AI platform currently handles more than 2 million interactions each day, while its inference platform processes roughly 10 million API calls daily. Its speech models transcribe over 500,000 hours of audio per month, and its document-processing systems are used to digitize more than 35 million pages of records.
Sarvam has also expanded its presence in public-sector projects. The company said its multilingual voice agents have been used to collect information from 17 million farmers for the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, while a voice-based campaign for a major insurer supported policy renewals for 45 million customers.
In the private sector, Sarvam said one large fintech company is using its agentic AI platform to support a sales network of more than 350,000 people.
The company previously raised $41 million across seed and Series A funding rounds and earlier this year released open-source models with 30 billion and 105 billion parameters. In 2024, Microsoft partnered with Sarvam to support voice-based generative AI applications, though financial details of the collaboration were not disclosed.
