Bengaluru‑based AI startup Sarvam has raised $234 million at a valuation of $1.5 billion, putting it on track to become India’s newest AI unicorn. The latest investment round is led by HCLTech, which is contributing around $150 million, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners alongside existing backers Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners. Sarvam is targeting a total raise of $300 million as part of its Series B round.
The new funding comes more than two years after the company secured $41 million across its seed and Series A rounds. The investment reflects a global push toward sovereign AI, as governments and enterprises seek greater control over foundational models and the computing infrastructure that powers them.
Sarvam is pursuing a full‑stack AI strategy, building models tailored for Indian languages and local use cases across banking, insurance, government services and defence. Its partnership with HCLTech is expected to accelerate commercialisation by combining Sarvam’s models with HCLTech’s enterprise relationships, engineering talent and software assets to build AI products for businesses and public‑sector organisations.
The company plans to use the new capital to advance research into next‑generation AI systems, including agentic AI, coding models and cybersecurity applications. It also aims to expand access to computing infrastructure as deployments scale across industries.
Sarvam’s conversational AI platform currently handles more than two million interactions daily, while its speech models transcribe over 500,000 hours of audio each month. Its multilingual voice‑agent system has already collected data from 17 million farmers for the Ministry of Agriculture, underscoring its growing role in India’s digital ecosystem.
Sarvam was founded by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, both formerly part of AI4Bharat at IIT Madras, an initiative backed by Nandan Nilekani.