Sarvam, a Bengaluru-based AI startup, raised $234 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, becoming India’s newest unicorn. The funding round, led by HCLTech, includes $150 million from the IT subsidiary of HCL Group, with Bessemer Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, and Peak XV Partners also participating. The company aims to raise a total of $300 million for its Series B round, following earlier funding of $41 million across its seed and Series A rounds. The investment comes after the startup launched its open-source models with 30 billion and 105 billion parameters earlier this year. Sarvam’s funding reflects a broader global push to develop sovereign AI capabilities amid concerns over access to advanced models and computing infrastructure.
The startup is among a few companies working to build a full-stack AI business, spanning model development, inference infrastructure, and enterprise applications. Sarvam’s models are designed for Indian languages and use cases, with products deployed across sectors including banking, insurance, government services, and defense. HCLTech’s investment provides Sarvam with a strategic partner to commercialize its technology by combining its AI models with HCLTech’s enterprise relationships, engineering workforce, and software assets. Sarvam said its conversational AI platform now handles more than 2 million interactions a day, while its inference platform processes roughly 10 million API calls daily. Its speech models transcribe more than 500,000 hours of audio each month, and its document AI systems are being used to digitize more than 35 million pages of records.
Those tools are increasingly being deployed at scale. The company said its multilingual voice agents have collected data from 17 million farmers for India’s Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare. Additionally, a nationwide voice campaign for a leading insurer helped support policy renewals for 45 million policyholders. Beyond government and consumer-facing applications, Sarvam said a large fintech company is using its agentic AI platform to support a sales force of more than 350,000 people. The startup 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 backed by technology veteran Nandan Nilekani.
"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."
Source: techcrunch
