Sarvam, India’s full-stack sovereign AI company, has raised US$234 million in the first close of its US$300 million Series B funding round, achieving a post-money valuation of US$1.5 billion.
HCLTech and Bessemer Venture Partners participated in the round, alongside existing investors Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners.
Sarvam operates across the AI stack, covering training and inference infrastructure, frontier model research, and go-to-market initiatives spanning enterprises, developers and government agencies. The fresh capital will support research into its next frontier model focused on agentic AI, coding and cybersecurity applications, as well as expand access to computing resources to accelerate deployments across key sectors.
“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 AI,” said Sarvam Co-Founder Pratyush Kumar.
HCLTech is investing US$150 million as the lead strategic investor in the round. The company said its enterprise transformation capabilities, global client base, proprietary software assets and engineering expertise will help accelerate Sarvam’s efforts to build an end-to-end sovereign AI ecosystem for India and beyond.
HCLTech CEO and Managing Director C Vijayakumar said the investment marks an important step in strengthening India’s AI ecosystem.
“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,” he said.
Sarvam has recently introduced several foundational AI models developed entirely in India. These include Sarvam 105B, which the company said performs on par with or better than larger reasoning models in knowledge, reasoning and agentic benchmarks, and Sarvam 30B, designed to run efficiently on consumer-grade hardware.
The company also developed Sarvam Vision, which specialises in handwriting recognition and Indian-language records, and is currently being used to digitise more than 35 million pages of documents, ranging from insurance forms to historical land records. Meanwhile, its speech models process over 500,000 hours of audio recordings each month.
Sarvam’s products are seeing increasing adoption in sectors such as banking, insurance, government technology and defence. Its conversational platform currently handles more than two million interactions daily, with usage doubling over the past two months.
Its agentic platform is also expanding, with a major fintech company using a sales enablement solution to support a workforce of 350,000 personnel. Sarvam’s inference platform serves developers in India and processes approximately 10 million API calls per day, with usage tripling in the last three months.
The company said its deployments are also creating impact at scale. Through multilingual voice agents, Sarvam helped collect data from 17 million farmers, providing insights to India’s Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare. For one of India’s leading insurance providers, Sarvam supported a nationwide voice campaign to facilitate low-cost 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. We are positioned to both help them adopt and innovate on AI. The partnership with HCLTech provides a unique example of an Indian corporate helping build foundational strength in AI,” said Sarvam Co-Founder Vivek Raghavan.
Bessemer Venture Partners Partner Pankaj Mitra said Sarvam is building India’s sovereign AI platform to serve its population, mission-critical sectors and large enterprises.
“Pratyush and Vivek have brought together the rare combination of research depth, engineering talent and institutional trust to meet India’s voice and agentic needs, and we are proud to partner with them,” he said.
