New Delhi, June 15 -- Sarvam AI, a full-stack generative AI startup, has raised $234 million (Rs 2,210 crore) in the first close of its $300 million Series B round, led by Indian information technology company HCL Technologies Ltd.
The Bengaluru-based startup was valued at $1.5 billion on a post-money basis, it said in a statement.
The round also saw participation from venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners, and existing VC investors Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners.
Separately, Mumbai-listed HCL Tech said in a stock-exchange filing it invested Rs 1,427.25 crore ($151 million) for a 10.46% stake in Axonwise Pvt Ltd, the company that operates Sarvam.
The startup, which develops large language models (LLMs) and multimodal AI systems, plans to use the capital for research on training its next frontier model for agentic, coding, and cybersecurity use-cases, as well as access to compute at scale to expand its forward-deployed motion across key verticals.
"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," said Pratyush Kumar, co-founder of Sarvam. "Building on this template, we are innovating on a full-stack offering for enterprises to own and operate their own sovereign AI."
The latest round comes more than about two and half years after Sarvam raised $41 million in its Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners in December 2023. Since then, the company has emerged as one of the few players in India building foundational AI models. Sarvam was founded in mid-2023. It reported revenue of Rs 45.10 crore in FY26, up from Rs 1.5 crore the previous year. It didn't generate any revenue in FY24.
With its models spanning language, speech, vision, and documents, the company is positioning itself as a 'sovereign AI' company, a topic of discussion and debate after the US government restricted Anthropic's AI models on security concerns last week.
The company says it is building across the AI stack: training and inference infrastructure, frontier models across text and other modalities, and AI products for enterprises, developers, and government, with focus verticals in banking, insurance, gov tech, and defence.
"Our investment in Sarvam marks a significant step toward building India's trusted and globally competitive AI ecosystem. By bringing together Sarvam's research in AI models with HCL Tech'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," said C Vijayakumar, CEO and managing director at HCL Tech.
HCL said it hopes to combine its deep enterprise transformation expertise, global client relationships, data and other software IP, and engineering depth, as a part of the investment.
Sarvam has recently released models trained from scratch including Sarvam 105B, Sarvam 30B, and Sarvam Vision. It claims its products are rapidly scaling, focused on verticals such as banking, insurance, governance tech, and defence, with its conversational platform now handling over 2 million interactions a day, with usage doubling in the last two months.
"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 Vivek Raghavan, co-founder of Sarvam.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from VC Circle.