Sarvam AI Joins Unicorn Club, HCLTech Buys 10.5% Stake

India’s artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Sarvam has entered the unicorn club after raising $234 million as part of its Series B funding round, said the company on Monday. The company's valuation reached $1.5 billion after investments from HCLTech and Bessemer Venture Partners in the round.

Overall, Sarvam aims to raise $300 million funds in its Series B round. Of this, it has secured only $234 million so far. Existing investors Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners also continued support in the round.

The AI start-up said that the investment will fund its research on training its next frontier model for agentic, coding, and cybersecurity use-cases. It will also help gain access to compute at scale to expand its operations.

“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, in a statement.

“Building on this template, we are innovating on a full-stack offering for enterprises to own and operate their own sovereign AI,” he added.

HCLTech to Help Sarvam Go Global

As part of the current fundraise, HCLTech will invest $150 million and act as the lead strategic investor.

HCLTech will acquire a 10.5% stake and ​41,421 equity shares as part of the investment, as per Reuters.

HCLTech would also help Sarvam with its enterprise transformation expertise, engineering, data and software IP, and global client relationships, aiding the company in expanding beyond India.

“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,” said C Vijayakumar, CEO & MD of HCLTech in a statement.

HCLTech's share price increased over 2% in early trade on Tuesday.

Sarvam’s Indigenous AI push

Earlier this year, Sarvam launched several of its products and services earlier this year, including its open source models and AI gadgets, all of which it says have been built indigenously in India.

The company said that its chatbot’s usage has doubled in the last two months with it now witnessing over 2 million interactions in a day. Over 10 million API requests are also being processed daily.

Sarvam said its multilingual voice agents, used by the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmer's Welfare, have collected data from 17 million farmers.

With the current fundraise, the company aims to expand globally while also scaling its product deployment and building larger models.

“For us, it's very clear that this is going to be a capital game. Access to compute will lead to more usage, more revenue, more fundraise. That's the cycle that we have right now kickstarted. This is day zero of us being a globally competitive AI company,” said Kumar in an interview with Moneycontrol.

“In terms of where the funds will go, we are going to be building larger models. And we are going to be deploying our products at scale. We are going to be investing in compute in India and being able to bring the talent that can again build more competitive models and run this compute effectively,” he added.