Bengaluru-based Sarvam crossed the unicorn line on Monday, raising $234 million at a $1.5 billion valuation in a Series B round led by Indian IT services group HCLTech as the country accelerates its push for sovereign artificial-intelligence infrastructure.
HCLTech Anchors The Round With $150M
HCLTech, the IT subsidiary of conglomerate HCL Group, is putting in $150 million of the round and joining as Sarvam's lead strategic partner. Bessemer Venture Partners participated as a new backer alongside existing investors Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners. The $234 million is the first close of a larger $300 million Series B, the company said.
Sarvam said it will combine its foundation models with HCLTech's enterprise customer base, engineering workforce and software assets to push agentic, coding and cybersecurity AI products into businesses and governments.
From AI4Bharat To 30B-Parameter Open Models
Founded in 2023 by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, both alumni of the IIT Madras-backed AI4Bharat initiative, Sarvam released open-source 30-billion- and 105-billion-parameter Sarvam-M models earlier this year. Its conversational AI now handles more than two million interactions a day, its inference platform processes about 10 million API calls daily, and its speech models transcribe more than 500,000 hours of audio each month.
The capital will fund research on next-generation frontier models focused on agentic AI, coding and cybersecurity applications, plus large-scale compute capacity for enterprise and government deployments.
Sovereign AI Push After Anthropic Block
The financing lands a week after the U.S. government ordered Anthropic to disable Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for foreign nationals, an event that sharpened New Delhi's debate over depending on overseas frontier models. India is already OpenAI's and Anthropic's second-largest market. Sarvam's multilingual voice agents have collected data from 17 million farmers for India's Ministry of Agriculture, while a nationwide voice campaign for an insurer touched 45 million policyholders.
The round also stacks on top of global AI mega-rounds like Skild AI's $1.4 billion Series C and Neura Robotics' record $1.4 billion in physical-AI capital, underscoring how investors are now writing nine-figure cheques outside Silicon Valley.
Reporting based on coverage from TechCrunch, BusinessToday, YourStory and Entrackr.