Amid growing interest in sovereign AI technologies, Sarvam, a Bengaluru startup, has secured major backing to scale models, infrastructure and enterprise deployments.
Bengaluru-based AI startup Sarvam has raised $234 million in fresh funding at a valuation of $1.5 billion, becoming India’s latest AI unicorn as demand grows for locally developed artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and computing infrastructure.
The investment round was led by HCLTech, which committed $150 million as a strategic investor. Existing backers Bessemer Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners also took part. Sarvam said it intends to raise $300 million in its Series B funding round.
The fundraising comes more than two years after the company secured $41 million across its seed and Series A rounds. Earlier in 2026, Sarvam introduced open-source AI models with 30-billion and 105-billion parameters.
The company is among a limited number of Indian firms pursuing a full-stack AI strategy, covering foundation model development, inference infrastructure and enterprise software applications. Its technologies are designed primarily for Indian languages and local use cases, with deployments spanning banking, insurance, government services and defence.
Sarvam said the new capital will be used to develop next-generation AI models focused on agentic systems, coding assistance and cybersecurity applications. The funding will also support expansion of computing infrastructure and wider deployment of its platforms across industries.
According to the company, its conversational AI platform currently handles more than two million interactions daily, while its inference platform processes around 10 million API calls each day. Its speech-recognition models transcribe over 500,000 hours of audio monthly, and its document-processing systems have digitised more than 35 million pages.
The startup also cited large-scale deployments in both public and private sectors. Its multilingual voice agents have supported data collection from 17 million farmers for India’s Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, while a nationwide insurance campaign assisted policy renewals for 45 million policyholders.
A major fintech company is also using Sarvam’s agentic AI platform to support a sales network of more than 350,000 personnel.
Founded by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, both formerly associated with AI4Bharat at Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Sarvam is positioning itself within a broader movement towards sovereign AI capabilities. The trend has gained attention as governments and enterprises seek greater control over advanced AI technologies, data infrastructure and access to frontier models.
The funding arrives at a time when India is emerging as one of the world’s largest AI adoption markets, while domestic efforts to build foundational AI technologies continue to face challenges related to computing resources and capital availability.
