A startup that didn’t exist two years ago just joined the billion-dollar club. Sarvam AI, founded in Bengaluru in August 2023, has raised $234M in a funding round that values the company at roughly $1.5B, making it India’s newest AI unicorn.
The round’s headline act: Indian IT giant HCLTech is writing a $150M check, accounting for nearly two-thirds of the total raise. Bessemer Venture Partners led the round, with Nvidia and Amazon also participating.
What Sarvam actually builds
Sarvam AI isn’t trying to out-GPT OpenAI. Instead, the company is building what it calls a “full-stack sovereign AI platform” designed from the ground up for India’s linguistic complexity. India has 22 officially recognized languages, and most Western AI models treat them as an afterthought, fine-tuned translations bolted onto English-first architectures.
In February 2026, the company released two large language models: Sarvam-30B and Sarvam-105B. Both use a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture. In English: instead of one massive neural network trying to do everything, MoE models route different tasks to specialized sub-networks, making them more efficient without sacrificing capability.
