Sarvam AI Raises $234 Mn in HCLTech-Led Series B Round at $1.5 Bn Valuation

Indian AI startup Sarvam AI has raised $234 million in the first close of its planned $300 million Series B round at a post-money valuation of $1.5 billion.

The round was led by HCLTech, which committed $150 million as a strategic investor. Existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, and Peak XV Partners also participated in the funding.

HCLTech also acquired a 10.46% stake in the company through an all-cash minority investment.

Sarvam said the capital will be used to fund research on its next frontier model focused on agentic AI, coding and cybersecurity applications, while also expanding access to large-scale compute infrastructure and supporting deployments across enterprises and government projects.

“We are clear that research-led innovation to create AI that works at India’s scale is a very large opportunity,” said Pratyush Kumar, Co-founder of Sarvam. “That means models that understand our voices, read our documents, and serve intelligence at a cost every enterprise and government can afford.”

The company develops AI models, infrastructure and enterprise software products. 

According to Sarvam, its recently released Sarvam 105B reasoning model matches or outperforms larger models on knowledge, reasoning and agentic benchmarks, while its Sarvam 30B model is designed to run on consumer hardware. The company also offers vision and speech models trained in India.

Sarvam said its conversational AI platform now handles more than 2 million interactions a day, while its inference platform processes over 10 million API calls daily. Usage on the inference platform has tripled in the past three months, the company said.

The startup added that its vision models are being used to digitise more than 35 million pages of documents, while its speech models transcribe over 500,000 hours of audio every month.

HCLTech said the partnership would combine Sarvam’s AI research with its enterprise customer base and engineering capabilities.

“Our investment in Sarvam marks a significant step toward building India's trusted and globally competitive AI ecosystem,” said C Vijayakumar, CEO and Managing Director of HCLTech. “By bringing together Sarvam's research in AI models with HCLTech’s global presence, we are creating a full-stack AI platform for enterprises and governments.”

Sarvam said its products are being deployed across banking, insurance, government and defence sectors. “Sarvam’s conversational platform now handles over 2 million interactions a day, with usage doubling in the last two months,” the company said in a statement.

It added that its multilingual voice platform collected data from 17 million farmers for the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare and supported policy renewal campaigns covering 45 million policyholders for a large insurance company.

“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,” said Vivek Raghavan, Co-founder of Sarvam. “The partnership with HCLTech provides a unique example of an Indian corporate helping build foundational strength in AI.”

Pankaj Mitra, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, said Sarvam has built capabilities across voice, agentic AI and foundation models, positioning it to serve both enterprise and government customers.

Founded in August 2023 by AI4Bharat veterans Raghavan and Kumar, Sarvam raised a $41 million Series A round led by Lightspeed within months of its launch. The Bengaluru-based company has worked with organisations including SBI Life, Tata Capital and government agencies, and serves customers across financial services, insurance and the public sector.

The funding comes days after Anthropic restricted access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 AI models following a US government directive, renewing focus on the need for sovereign AI capabilities for enterprise and public-sector use cases.