Bengaluru-based AI startup Sarvam announced in June 2026 that it has raised $234 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, making it India’s newest AI unicorn. The company is targeting a total of $300 million for its Series B round.
HCLTech, the IT subsidiary of Indian conglomerate HCL Group, is contributing $150 million as the lead strategic investor. Bessemer Venture Partners also participated in the round, alongside existing backers Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners. The raise comes more than two years after Sarvam closed $41 million across its seed and Series A rounds.
Sarvam was founded by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, who previously worked at AI4Bharat, an Indian-language AI research initiative at IIT Madras. The company builds a full-stack AI business spanning model development, inference infrastructure, and enterprise applications, with models designed for Indian languages and use cases. Its products are deployed across banking, insurance, government services, and defense.
The partnership with HCLTech is intended to combine Sarvam’s AI models with HCLTech’s enterprise relationships, engineering workforce, and software assets to build AI products for businesses and governments. Sarvam said the new funding will also support research into next-generation models focused on agentic, coding, and cybersecurity applications.
The company reported that its conversational AI platform handles more than 2 million interactions per day, its inference platform processes roughly 10 million API calls daily, and its speech models transcribe more than 500,000 hours of audio each month. Among its deployments, multilingual voice agents have collected data from 17 million farmers for India’s Ministry of Agriculture, and a voice campaign for an insurer supported policy renewals for 45 million policyholders.
The funding reflects a broader push toward sovereign AI development. That urgency was underscored last week when the U.S. government ordered Anthropic to suspend foreign-national access to its latest models, highlighting how access to advanced AI systems remains concentrated among a small number of overseas providers. Despite India being described by both OpenAI and Anthropic as their second-largest market after the U.S., the country has produced few startups attempting to build homegrown foundation models at this scale.
Source: TechCrunch