New Delhi, June 16 -- India has minted another artificial-intelligence unicorn, and this one is built on a deliberately contrarian bet: that the country should make its own foundation models rather than rent everyone else's. Sarvam, a three-year-old startup, crossed the billion-dollar line on Monday with the kind of cheque India's AI scene has rarely seen.

HCLTech, the IT arm of the HCL group, put in $150 million for a stake of more than 10 per cent, with Bessemer Venture Partners joining existing backers Khosla Ventures and Peak XV, TechCrunch reported. Founded in 2023 by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, Sarvam has spent its short life building large language and speech models tuned for India's languages rather than for English-speaki...