Sarvam.ai attains unicorn status with $234m funding round

By Milan Rojan

Indian artificial intelligence startup Sarvam.ai has secured $234 million in fresh funding, valuing the company at $1.5 billion and giving it unicorn status.

The funding round has been led by HCLTech, which has committed $150 million as the lead strategic investor. Bessemer Venture Partners has also participated in the round alongside existing investors Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners. Sarvam has stated that it is targeting a total Series B raise of $300 million.

Sarvam has developed a full-stack artificial intelligence platform spanning AI model development, inference infrastructure and enterprise applications. Its models have been designed for Indian languages and have been deployed across sectors including banking, insurance, government services and defence.

The company’s collaboration with HCLTech has been expected to combine Sarvam’s AI capabilities with the technology services firm’s enterprise reach, engineering expertise and software assets. The partnership has been aimed at supporting the development and deployment of AI solutions for enterprises and public-sector organisations.

Vivek Raghavan, Co-founder of Sarvam, said: “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. We are positioned to both help them adopt and innovate on AI.”

Sarvam has said the new capital will be used to advance research into next-generation AI models focused on agentic AI, coding and cybersecurity, while expanding its computing infrastructure.

The company has reported that 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 models have transcribed more than 500,000 hours of audio every month, and its document AI systems have digitised over 35 million pages of records.

Sarvam has also stated that its multilingual voice agents have collected information from 17 million farmers for the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare and have supported policy renewals for 45 million policyholders through a nationwide voice campaign for a leading insurer.

The funding has reflected growing investor interest in sovereign AI initiatives as organisations seek greater control over artificial intelligence technologies, infrastructure and data management capabilities.