Sarvam, the Bengaluru company building India’s sovereign AI stack, has become the country’s newest AI unicorn. It has raised $234m in the first close of a $300m Series B, at a $1.5bn valuation, led by IT services giant HCLTech, which is putting in $150m.
The round is a sovereign-AI bet with a strategic spine.
HCLTech is the lead investor; Bessemer Venture Partners joined, with existing backers Khosla Ventures and Peak XV. Sarvam was founded by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, both veterans of AI4Bharat, the Indian-language AI effort at IIT Madras backed by Nandan Nilekani.
Earlier this year it released open-source models trained from scratch in India: a 105-billion-parameter system it says rivals larger models, and a 30-billion one tuned to run on consumer hardware.
Why HCLTech is betting on Sarvam
