Indian AI startup Sarvam has closed a $234 million funding round at a $1.5 billion valuation, becoming the country's newest AI unicorn. The round was led by HCLTech, which contributed $150 million, alongside Bessemer Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, and Peak XV Partners.
Based in Bengaluru, Sarvam is building a full-stack AI platform that combines model development, inference infrastructure, and enterprise applications. The company says its systems are tailored for Indian languages and practical use cases across banking, insurance, public services, and defense.
Scaling models, infrastructure, and use cases
The fresh capital follows Sarvam's earlier seed and Series A funding and comes after the launch of its open-source models in 30-billion and 105-billion parameter versions. The startup plans to channel the new investment into next-generation AI research, with a focus on agentic tools, coding, and cybersecurity, while expanding access to computing capacity.
Sarvam also reports strong operational traction: its conversational AI platform handles more than 2 million interactions daily, its inference layer processes around 10 million API calls each day, and its speech models transcribe over 500,000 hours of audio monthly. Its document AI tools are helping digitize more than 35 million pages of records.
The company's multilingual voice agents have also supported large-scale public and commercial deployments, including data collection for 17 million farmers under India's Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, as well as a nationwide voice campaign for an insurer serving 45 million policyholders.
Founded by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, Sarvam emerged from India's growing AI research ecosystem and aims to broaden access to advanced AI across citizens, businesses, and institutions. As India strengthens its role in the global AI landscape, companies like Sarvam may help shape a more locally rooted and scalable digital future.