What Is Sarvam AI? India’s Newest Unicorn Backed by HCLTech: Funding to Valuation | 5 Things to Know

The Bengaluru-based startup, Sarvam AI, became India's latest entrant in the unicorn club after securing funding from big companies like HCLTech. The AI startup raised $234 million in its second round of fundraising. HCL Group's IT subsidiary acquired 10.5% stake in Sarvam AI for $150.7 million, ie Rs 1,427 crore.

HCLTech acquired a stake in Sarvam AI as a strategic investor in its Series B round. With this, Sarvam AI has strengthened India's position in the global AI market, where only a handful of homegrown AI players compete in a space dominated by names like Anthropic and OpenAI.

What is Sarvam AI?

Sarvam AI was founded by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar. The two had previously worked at AI4Bharat, an Indian-language AI research initiative at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.

The Bengaluru-based startup is building AI systems designed for Indian languages and local use cases. Its work spans model development, inference infrastructure and enterprise applications, placing it in a category often described as full-stack AI. That approach requires substantial capital, especially because training and deploying large models is expensive.

Sarvam AI Series B Funding Round

The funding round also included names like Bessemer Venture Partners alongside existing investors like Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners. The company aims to raise a total of $300 million for its Series B round funding.

Sarvam AI Valuation

The company is valued at $1.5 billion after raising $234 million in the recent funding round. The round was led by HCLTech, which is committing $150 million as a strategic investor.

The fresh capital follows Sarvam's earlier fundraising of $41 million across its seed and Series A rounds. The company has also launched open-source models with 30 billion and 105 billion parameters, underlining its attempt to create advanced systems that can support Indian-language computing and sector-specific enterprise needs.

Sarvam AI Conversational Platform

The startup's conversational AI platform caters to nearly 2 million interactions every day. Its inference platform processes close to 10 million API calls daily. Sarvam's speech models transcribe more than 5,00,000 hours of audio every month. As per a TechCrunch report, the company has claimed that its document AI systems are being used to digitise more than 35 million pages of records.

HCLTech Backs Sarvam AI

HCLTech's investment in Sarvam AI can help the startup in upgrading its services and capabilities. HCL Tech will also bring its deep enterprise relationships, engineering capacity and access to larger digital transformation programmes for the startup.

For Sarvam, this could help convert research-led AI systems into commercial products for banks, insurers, government departments and large corporations. The partnership is expected to combine Sarvam's models with HCLTech's software assets and client network.