Sarvam joins the unicorn club with $234 million in fresh capital to advance agentic AI & cybersecurity technologies

Sarvam has raised $234 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, becoming India’s latest AI unicorn, the Bengaluru-based startup announced on Monday. The funding comes as governments and businesses increasingly seek greater control over AI technologies and computing infrastructure.

Of the total amount raised, $150 million will be invested by HCLTech, the IT services arm of the HCL Group and the lead strategic investor in the round. Existing investors Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners also participated, alongside Bessemer Venture Partners. Sarvam aims to raise a total of $300 million as part of its Series B funding round.

The latest investment comes more than two years after Sarvam secured $41 million across its seed and Series A funding rounds. It also follows the startup’s launch of open-source AI models with 30 billion and 105 billion parameters earlier this year.

The funding underscores a growing global push toward sovereign AI, as governments and enterprises seek greater control over advanced AI models and the computing infrastructure that supports them amid rising geopolitical and technological concerns.

Sarvam is among a small group of startups pursuing a full-stack AI strategy, covering everything from model development and inference infrastructure to enterprise applications. The company says its AI models are tailored for Indian languages and local use cases, with deployments already spanning sectors such as banking, insurance, government services, and defense.

The backing from HCLTech provides Sarvam with a powerful strategic partner as it scales its commercial operations. The collaboration aims to combine Sarvam’s AI capabilities with HCLTech’s extensive enterprise network, engineering expertise, and software portfolio to develop AI-driven solutions for businesses and public-sector organisations.

The investment also highlights India’s growing importance in the global AI ecosystem. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have identified India as their second-largest market after the United States, driven by the rapid adoption of AI technologies among developers, enterprises, and consumers.

Despite being one of the world’s largest AI markets, India has produced relatively few companies capable of developing frontier AI models. High computing costs and limited access to large-scale funding have made it challenging for domestic startups to compete with heavily funded rivals in the United States and China, leaving Sarvam among a select group building indigenous foundation models.

The importance of AI sovereignty came into sharper focus last week after Anthropic reportedly restricted access to its latest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, following a U.S. government directive barring their use by foreign nationals on national security grounds. The episode underscored the risks of relying on a handful of overseas providers for access to advanced AI technologies.

Sarvam said the new capital will be used to accelerate research and development of next-generation AI models, particularly in agentic AI, coding, and cybersecurity. The company also plans to expand the computing infrastructure and scale deployments of its AI solutions across multiple industries.

Sarvam said its conversational AI platform now supports more than 2 million interactions daily, while its inference infrastructure handles around 10 million API requests each day. The company’s speech AI models transcribe over 500,000 hours of audio every month, and its document AI systems have digitised more than 35 million pages of records.

The startup’s technologies are increasingly being deployed at scale. According to Sarvam, its multilingual voice agents have assisted the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare in collecting data from 17 million farmers across India. It also powered a nationwide voice campaign for a major insurance company, helping facilitate policy renewals for 45 million customers.

Sarvam’s enterprise adoption is also expanding. The company said a leading fintech firm is using its agentic AI platform to support a sales network of more than 350,000 personnel.

Founded by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, Sarvam traces its roots to AI4Bharat, the Indian-language AI research initiative at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras backed by technology entrepreneur Nandan Nilekani.

“Our goal is to make AI accessible at scale across India, creating value for citizens, small businesses, enterprises, and governments,” said Raghavan. “We are uniquely positioned to help organisations both adopt and build with AI.”