Sarvam AI becomes unicorn after raising $234 mn; HCLTech acquires over 10%

Sarvam AI, India’s full-stack sovereign artificial intelligence (AI) company, has become a unicorn after raising $234 million, or around ₹2,210 crore, in a Series B funding round.

The round was led by HCLTech and Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners. The fundraise marks a sharp jump from Sarvam's previous valuation of about $196 million in 2025, after it raised $228,000 from Avvanti Advisors, according to Tracxn data.

As part of the transaction, HCLTech will acquire a 10.46 per cent stake in the Bengaluru-based startup for ₹1,427.25 crore, making it the lead strategic investor. Sarvam joins Bhavish Aggarwal-founded Krutrim as only India’s AI startups to achieve unicorn status.

The funding comes amid growing calls for India to develop sovereign AI capabilities following the US government’s export-control order blocking foreign nationals from accessing Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models.

"We are going to use the capital for inferencing, agentic AI, training larger models and similar initiatives,” Vivek Raghavan, co-founder of Sarvam, told Business Standard. “Inferencing at scale and training larger models require significant GPU compute.”

Raghavan said the recent US export-control measures were a “wake-up call”. He argued that “access to these technologies cannot be taken for granted. It is important to have companies that fundamentally understand these technologies and can build and leverage them.”

Sarvam develops AI technologies across the stack, including model training and inference infrastructure, frontier-model research and enterprise, developer and government applications.

HCLTech said the partnership combines Sarvam's AI research with the IT services firm’s enterprise relationships, engineering capabilities and global reach to build a sovereign AI platform for enterprises and governments. “Our investment in Sarvam marks a significant step toward building India's trusted and globally competitive AI ecosystem,” said C Vijayakumar, chief executive of HCLTech.

Pankaj Mitra, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, said India’s AI ambitions will require much more than indigenous foundation models. He said the country needs to build a complete sovereign AI stack spanning infrastructure, data, applications, and intelligent systems.

Sarvam has recently released a series of AI models trained from scratch in India, including its 105-billion-parameter reasoning model and a 30-billion-parameter model designed to run on consumer-grade hardware. Its speech, vision and conversational AI platforms are being deployed across enterprise and government use cases, processing millions of interactions daily.

“We are clear that research-led innovation to create AI that works at India’s scale is a very large opportunity. That means models that understand our voices, read our documents, and serve intelligence at a cost every enterprise and government can afford. Building on this template, we are innovating on a full-stack offering for enterprises to own and operate their own sovereign,” said Pratyush Kumar, another co-founder of Sarvam.