New Delhi: Around 30-50 per cent of Sarvam AI’s latest round of $300 million funding will go towards procuring new compute and GPU power, the Bengaluru-based AI start-up that just became a unicorn, said. In an interview with ThePrint, Sarvam spoke about their $300 million Series B funding, which led to a billion-dollar valuation last week, and their plans for growth in India’s sovereign AI space.
“One of our focus areas will be frontier model research and development, including setting up a San Francisco office to attract top talent,” the company said in an email.On 15 June, after their Series B funding closed, Sarvam joined the elite league of AI unicorns in India—with HCLTech leading the investment round.
Founded in August 2023 by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, Sarvam is developing full-stack AI platforms for governments, enterprises, and developers. The AI company also makes large language models and multimodal AI systems with a focus on Indian languages and region-specific use cases.Their main selling point is that, unlike OpenAI, Anthropic, or Mistral, Sarvam AI is uniquely designed keeping the Indian customer in mind. They currently have five products out, including Sarvam Samvaad, which is a voice-based conversational AI available in 11 languages, and Sarvam Studio, which is an AI content tool for dubbing and translating.The company shared that currently, more than 90 per cent of Sarvam’s usage is for revenue-generating business and government enterprises, rather than for individual customers. They plan to scale up their business by focusing on government, defence and enterprise clients, with an AI capability that is “built and served” in India. The recent restrictions imposed by the United States government on certain Anthropic models has sparked India’s AI sovereignty push.“That means models that understand our voices, read our documents, and serve intelligence at a cost every enterprise and government can afford,” said Pratyush Kumar in a press release after their last round of funding.According to Sarvam, the new round of funding will largely be used for expanding their compute infrastructure and scaling up their business through talent acquisition. While they did not set a date for the San Francisco office yet, the company did say that they will predominantly continue to hire in India, except for certain exceptional individuals based in the US.
