Indian artificial intelligence company Sarvam has raised $234 million in the first close of a planned $300 million Series B round, valuing the Bengaluru-based company at $1.5 billion. The funding makes Sarvam India’s newest AI unicorn as it develops locally controlled AI models, computing infrastructure, and enterprise applications.
HCLTech will invest $150 million as the lead strategic investor. Bessemer Venture Partners also joined the round, while existing investors Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners continued their support, according to Sarvam’s funding announcement.
HCLTech Joins as Strategic Investor
The investment follows the $41 million Sarvam raised through its seed and Series A rounds more than two years ago. It also comes after the company released open-source models with 30 billion and 105 billion parameters earlier in 2026.
Under the partnership, Sarvam will combine its AI models with HCLTech’s enterprise relationships, engineering workforce, data, and software assets. HCLTech said the companies plan to develop AI products for businesses and government organizations.
Sarvam operates across model development, inference infrastructure, and enterprise applications. Its models focus on Indian languages and local use cases, with deployments across banking, insurance, public services, and defense.
The company plans to use the new capital for research into models focused on agentic AI, coding, and cybersecurity. It will also expand access to computing infrastructure as deployments increase across different industries.
Sarvam Reports Large-Scale AI Deployments
Sarvam said its conversational AI platform handles more than 2 million interactions each day, while its inference platform processes about 10 million API calls daily. Its speech models transcribe more than 500,000 hours of audio each month, and its document systems are helping digitize more than 35 million pages of records.
The company’s multilingual voice agents have collected data from 17 million farmers for India’s Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare. A nationwide voice campaign for a major insurer also supported policy renewals for 45 million policyholders.
A large financial technology company is using Sarvam’s agentic AI platform to support a sales team of more than 350,000 people. Sarvam offers speech, translation, document processing, and conversational AI tools across 22 Indian languages.
Funding Follows AI Access Restrictions
India is the second-largest market after the United States for both OpenAI and Anthropic, according to statements from the two companies. However, Indian startups have faced high computing costs and limited capital while trying to develop foundation models that can compete with companies in the United States and China.
Questions about national control over AI systems increased after the U.S. government ordered Anthropic to suspend foreign-national access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models over national security concerns. Anthropic disabled the models because it could not restrict access according to users’ nationalities.
Sarvam was founded by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, who previously worked at AI4Bharat, an Indian-language AI research initiative at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.
“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.”
Featured image credits: Magnific.com
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