AI startup Sarvam has raised $234 million in the first close of its $300 million Series B round at a post-money valuation of $1.5 billion, becoming one of India's newest AI unicorns.
The round was led by HCLTech, which committed $150 million for a 10.46% stake, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners. Existing investors Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners also backed the financing.
The Bengaluru-based company said the fresh capital will be used to advance research on its next-generation frontier models focused on agentic AI, coding, and cybersecurity applications, while expanding access to large-scale compute infrastructure and accelerating enterprise and government deployments.
Founded by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, Sarvam develops AI models, inference infrastructure, and enterprise AI products tailored for Indian languages and use cases. The startup has recently released several foundational models trained from scratch in India, including Sarvam 105B, Sarvam 30B, and Sarvam Vision.
According to the company, its conversational AI platform now handles more than 2 million interactions daily, while its inference platform processes over 10 million API calls every day. It also claims that usage across its platforms has grown sharply in recent months.
Sarvam has secured deployments across banking, insurance, government, and defence sectors. According to the company, its multilingual voice platform has engaged with 17 million farmers for government-led data collection initiatives, while its AI-powered outreach programs have supported policy renewals for 45 million insurance customers nationwide.
“Research-led innovation to create AI that works at India's scale is a very large opportunity,” said co-founder Pratyush Kumar. “Building on this template, we are innovating on a full-stack offering for enterprises to own and operate their own sovereign AI.”
The latest round comes more than two years after Sarvam raised $41 million in a Series A funding round led by Lightspeed in December 2023, with participation from Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures.
According to HCLTech's disclosure, Sarvam reported unaudited revenue of Rs 45.1 crore for FY26.
The funding highlights growing investor interest in sovereign AI and homegrown foundation models as India seeks to build AI infrastructure and applications tailored to local languages, enterprises, and public-sector use cases.
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