Sarvam has raised $234 million in the first close of a $300 million Series B round at a post-money valuation of $1.5 billion, with HCLTech leading as a strategic investor.
HCLTech said it invested $150 million as part of the first close. Bessemer Venture Partners also participated, alongside existing investors Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners.
The funding will be used to support Sarvam’s research on its next “frontier” model, including agentic, coding and cybersecurity use cases, and to expand access to large-scale compute infrastructure. The company said it also plans to scale deployments across sectors including banking, insurance, government technology and defence.
The raise comes as governments and enterprises seek greater control over AI infrastructure, models and data, driving interest in “sovereign AI” approaches that can be developed and governed locally.
“We are clear that research-led innovation to create AI that works at India’s scale is a very large opportunity,” said Pratyush Kumar, co-founder of Sarvam. “Building on this template, we are innovating on a full-stack offering for enterprises to own and operate their own sovereign AI.”
HCLTech said the partnership is intended to combine Sarvam’s model development work with HCLTech’s engineering and enterprise delivery capability to build an end-to-end sovereign AI platform for organisations in India and other 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. “By bringing together Sarvam’s research in AI models with HCLTech’s global presence, we are creating a differentiated full-stack AI platform for enterprises and governments, strengthening our ability to deliver secure, scalable, and responsible AI solutions.”
Sarvam said it has recently released foundational models trained in India, including “Sarvam 105B” and “Sarvam 30B”. It also cited deployments including document digitisation and speech transcription workloads, and said its conversational platform is handling more than 2 million interactions a day.
Sarvam also referenced government-related deployments, including a multilingual voice agent platform used to collect data from 17 million farmers for India’s Ministry of Agriculture and Farmer’s Welfare, and a voice campaign for an insurance provider supporting policy renewals for 45 million policyholders.
“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,” said Vivek Raghavan, co-founder of Sarvam.
“Sarvam is building and deploying India’s sovereign AI platform – serving 1.4 billion citizens, mission-critical sectors, and large enterprises,” said Pankaj Mitra, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners.
