Sarvam has entered India’s unicorn club after raising US$234 million in a funding round led by HCLTech, underscoring growing investor confidence in home-grown open-source AI models and sovereign AI infrastructure.
Bengaluru-based AI startup Sarvam has become India’s newest unicorn after raising US$234 million in a Series B funding round led by HCLTech, which invested US$150 million and helped propel the company’s valuation to US$1.5 billion. The round also attracted participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners, with Sarvam planning to expand the raise to US$300 million.
The milestone highlights growing investor confidence in India’s open-source AI ecosystem. Since raising US$41 million in seed and Series A funding two years ago, Sarvam has released indigenous open-source foundation models with 30 billion and 105 billion parameters, positioning itself among a select group of Indian companies developing large-scale AI models.
Unlike many AI startups focused primarily on applications, Sarvam is building a full-stack AI platform spanning foundation models, inference infrastructure, enterprise software, agentic AI platforms, speech AI and document AI. Its solutions target Indian-language applications as well as banking, insurance, government and defence sectors.
The company reports more than 2 million conversational AI interactions and around 10 million inference API calls daily. Its speech models process over 500,000 hours of speech each month, while its document AI systems have digitised more than 35 million pages.
Sarvam’s multilingual voice agents have enabled the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare to collect information from 17 million farmers, while a nationwide insurance initiative supported the renewal of 45 million policies. A major fintech company is also using its agentic AI platform to support more than 350,000 sales employees.
The new funding will support research into next-generation AI models, agentic systems, coding and cybersecurity AI, alongside expanded compute infrastructure.
“The aim is to spread this technology in India and bring value to citizens, small businesses, enterprises, and state and central governments in the country,” said Vivek Raghavan, co-founder of Sarvam. “With AI, we’re in a great place to help them adopt and innovate.”
