Sarvam, the Bengaluru-based AI startup building full-stack Indian-language AI infrastructure, has raised $234 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, making it India’s newest AI unicorn. HCLTech, the IT subsidiary of HCL Group, led the round with a $150 million strategic commitment, with Bessemer Venture Partners participating alongside existing backers Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners. Sarvam is targeting a total Series B raise of $300 million.
The funding arrives as concerns over AI sovereignty intensify globally. The urgency sharpened last week when Anthropic disabled access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models following a U.S. government order suspending their use by foreign nationals, a move that exposed how dependent many countries remain on a handful of overseas AI providers. Both Anthropic and OpenAI have described India as their second-largest market after the United States.
Founded by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, formerly of Indian-language AI research initiative AI4Bharat at IIT Madras, Sarvam spans model development, inference infrastructure, and enterprise applications tailored to Indian languages and use cases. Its platform now handles more than two million conversational interactions daily, processes roughly ten million API calls per day, and transcribes more than 500,000 hours of audio monthly. Deployments include a voice agent that collected agricultural data from 17 million farmers for India’s Ministry of Agriculture and an insurance campaign supporting 45 million policyholders.
New funding will be directed toward next-generation agentic, coding, and cybersecurity AI models, as well as expanded computing infrastructure to support growing enterprise and government deployments.
