Meet Sarvam, The Indian AI Startup That Just Joined The Billion Dollar Club

HCLTech just put $150 million into an Indian AI startup. Sarvam is now valued at $1.5 billion and it is quietly handling some of the country's biggest data challenges.

Two IIT Madras researchers founded Sarvam to bring AI to India in its own languages.

Source : Sarvam AI

Show Quick Read

Key points generated by AI, verified by newsroom

• AI startup Sarvam achieves unicorn status with $234M funding.
• HCLTech led the round, strategically partnering to build enterprise AI products.
• Sarvam develops full-stack AI for diverse Indian language applications.

Bengaluru-based AI startup Sarvam has raised $234 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, making it India's newest AI unicorn. The funding round is led by HCLTech, the IT arm of HCL Group, which is putting in $150 million as the lead strategic investor. Bessemer Venture Partners also joined the round, alongside existing backers Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners. Sarvam is targeting a total of $300 million for its Series B. 

The rise comes as governments and companies push harder to build control over AI technologies and computing infrastructure.

Why HCLTech's Bet On Sarvam Makes Strategic Sense

This is Sarvam's first major raise in over two years, following the $41 million it collected across its seed and Series A rounds. Earlier this year, the startup also released open-source models in 30-billion- and 105-billion-parameter sizes.

The partnership with HCLTech is designed to go beyond capital. The plan combines Sarvam's AI models with HCLTech's enterprise relationships, engineering workforce, and software assets to build AI products for businesses and governments.

Sarvam is building what it describes as a full-stack AI business, covering model development, inference infrastructure, and enterprise applications. Its models are built for Indian languages and use cases, with deployments across banking, insurance, government services, and defence.

How Sarvam Is Scaling Across India's Key Sectors

The company's conversational AI platform handles more than 2 million interactions a day. 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 digitising more than 35 million pages of records.

Its 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 leading insurer supported policy renewals for 45 million policyholders. A large fintech company is also using Sarvam's agentic AI platform to support a sales force of more than 350,000 people.

Sarvam was founded by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, who previously worked at AI4Bharat, an Indian-language AI research initiative at IIT Madras backed by 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."

OpenAI Data Shows India Among Top Countries Using ChatGPT For World Cup