Indian artificial intelligence startup Sarvam on Monday announced that it has entered the unicorn club after raising $234 million in the first close of its $300 million Series B funding round, taking its post-money valuation to $1.5 billion.
The funding round was led by HCLTech as a strategic investor, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners and continued backing from existing investors Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners.
The latest fundraise marks a major milestone for the Bengaluru-based company, which is positioning itself as India’s full-stack sovereign AI platform.
Sarvam said the capital will be used to advance research on its next-generation frontier AI models focused on agentic AI, coding and cybersecurity applications, while also expanding access to large-scale computing infrastructure and accelerating deployments across key sectors.
As part of the round, HCLTech will invest $150 million, making it the lead strategic investor.
The IT services major said the partnership would combine Sarvam’s AI research capabilities with HCLTech’s enterprise expertise, engineering talent and global customer relationships to build a comprehensive sovereign AI ecosystem for India and international markets.
“Our investment in Sarvam marks a significant step toward building India’s trusted and globally competitive AI ecosystem,” said C Vijayakumar, CEO and Managing Director of HCLTech.
He added that the collaboration would help create a differentiated full-stack AI platform for enterprises and governments while enabling secure, scalable and responsible AI adoption.
Sarvam Co-founder Pratyush Kumar said the company remains focused on research-led innovation aimed at building AI systems that work at India’s scale.
He noted that the company is developing models capable of understanding Indian languages and voices, processing local documents and delivering affordable intelligence for enterprises and governments.
The company has rapidly expanded its AI portfolio in recent months. It has launched multiple foundational models trained entirely in India, including Sarvam 105B, which the company claims matches or outperforms larger reasoning models on several benchmarks, and Sarvam 30B, which is designed to run efficiently on consumer hardware.
Its document intelligence model, Sarvam Vision, is being used to digitise more than 35 million pages of records, ranging from insurance forms to land documents.
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