Sarvam Raises $234M as India’s Newest AI Unicorn with HCLTech Investment
Bengaluru-based Sarvam, an AI startup, has raised a massive $234 million in funding. This round includes $150 million from tech giant HCLTech.
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Bengaluru-based Sarvam, an artificial intelligence (AI) unicorn, has just announced it has raised a staggering $234 million at a valuation of $1.5 billion. This latest funding round marks the company's growth as India's newest AI success story, with significant implications for the tech landscape in the country.
The bulk of this investment, a whopping $150 million, comes from HCLTech, the IT subsidiary of Indian conglomerate HCL Group, and strategic investor in the round. Bessemer Venture Partners also participated alongside existing backers Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners. Sarvam is aiming to raise an additional $166 million for its Series B round, bringing the total funding target to a robust $300 million.
This investment follows Sarvam's launch of open-source models in 30 billion- and 105 billion-parameter scales earlier this year. The new funding underscores India's increasing focus on developing its own AI capabilities, driven by growing concerns over access to advanced AI technologies.
A Full-Stack AI Business
Sarvam, led by co-founders Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, who previously worked at AI4Bharat, an Indian-language AI research initiative at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, is positioning itself as a full-stack AI business. This includes model development, inference infrastructure, and enterprise applications tailored to Indian languages and use cases.
Deployment Across Sectors
The startup's technology is being deployed across various sectors including banking, insurance, government services, and defense. Raghavan emphasizes the company’s ambition to diffuse AI technology widely in India, creating significant value for citizens, small businesses, enterprises, and state and central governments.
Strategic Partnerships
The investment from HCLTech is not just financial; it's strategic. According to Sarvam, this partnership will help them commercialize their technology by combining AI models with HCLTech’s extensive enterprise relationships, engineering workforce, and software assets. The plan is to build AI products for businesses and governments.
Future Research
With the fresh investment, Sarvam intends to focus on research into its next-generation AI models, particularly in agentic, coding, and cybersecurity applications. They also aim to expand access to computing infrastructure as they scale deployments across industries.
Current Usage Statistics
Sarvam's 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 over 500,000 hours of audio each month, and their document AI systems are being used to digitize more than 35 million pages of records.
Impactful Deployments
The company's 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. A large fintech company is also using Sarvam’s agentic AI platform to support a sales force of over 350,000 people.
