Sarvam Becomes India’s Newest AI Unicorn With a $234M Round Led by HCLTech

Sarvam AI, the Bengaluru startup building foundation models tuned for Indian languages, said on June 15 that it has raised $234 million in the first close of its Series B — vaulting the three-year-old company to a $1.5 billion post-money valuation and minting India’s newest artificial-intelligence unicorn. According to TechCrunch, the company is targeting $300 million for the full round, with the remaining roughly $66 million expected to close in the coming months.

The round was led by IT services giant HCLTech, which wrote a $150 million strategic check, alongside Bessemer Venture Partners and existing backers Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners. It dwarfs the roughly $41 million Sarvam had raised across its seed and Series A rounds more than two years ago, and signals that India’s largest enterprises now see a domestic model-builder as a strategic asset rather than a science project.

Sarvam was founded in 2023 by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, who previously worked on AI4Bharat, the Indian-language AI research initiative at IIT Madras. The company has built a full-stack business spanning foundation models optimized for Indian languages, its own inference infrastructure, and enterprise applications across banking, insurance, government services and defense. It says its platform now handles about 2 million conversational AI interactions and 10 million API calls a day, plus more than 500,000 hours of audio transcription each month.

The fresh capital will go toward training Sarvam’s next frontier model and expanding access to the compute needed to deploy it at scale, with new investment aimed squarely at agentic, coding and cybersecurity use cases — the same high-value workloads frontier labs in the United States and China are racing to own. “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,” the founders said.

The raise lands as India tries to convert its vast pool of AI talent and data into homegrown models rather than remaining a consumer of systems built elsewhere. A model fluent in dozens of Indian languages — and run on domestic infrastructure — is a different proposition for a bank, an insurer or a government department than a general-purpose Western model, and HCLTech’s lead position hints at a channel to push Sarvam’s technology into large enterprise and public-sector deployments.