level: business
sarvam, a bengaluru-based ai startup, raised $234 million in a series b round led by hcltech, reaching a $1.5 billion valuation and becoming india's newest ai unicorn. the round includes $150 million from hcltech, with participation from bessemer venture partners, khosla ventures, and peak xv partners. sarvam aims to raise a total of $300 million. the funding follows its launch of open-source models with 30 billion and 105 billion parameters earlier this year.
the investment reflects a push for sovereign ai capabilities as countries seek control over critical technologies. sarvam builds full-stack ai spanning model development, inference infrastructure, and enterprise apps, focusing on indian languages and use cases. its products are deployed in banking, insurance, government services, and defense. the partnership with hcltech will combine sarvam's models with hcltech's enterprise relationships and engineering workforce to create ai products for businesses and governments.
sarvam's conversational ai platform handles over 2 million interactions daily, its inference platform processes 10 million api calls, and its speech models transcribe 500,000 hours of audio monthly. its multilingual voice agents collected data from 17 million farmers for india's agriculture ministry, and a voice campaign supported policy renewals for 45 million policyholders. a large fintech company uses its agentic ai platform to support a sales force of over 350,000 people. the new funds will support research into agentic, coding, and cybersecurity models and expand computing infrastructure.
why it matters: this funding highlights the growing demand for localized ai infrastructure and models, especially in markets like india where language diversity and data sovereignty are critical for enterprise and government adoption.