Indian govt stake in Sarvam may be valued at about $1.5B: ET

India's Sarvam AI, a full-stack sovereign artificial intelligence (AI) company, has raised $234 million in the first close of its $300 million Series B funding round, valuing the startup at $1.5 billion post-money. The investment was led by HCLTech, India's second-largest IT services firm, which contributed $150 million as a strategic investor. Bessemer Venture Partners also participated, alongside existing investors Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners.

The funding will support Sarvam's research and development of next-generation AI models focused on agentic functions, coding, and cybersecurity, as well as expansion of computing infrastructure for deployment across enterprises, developers, and government agencies. HCLTech emphasized that the partnership would help accelerate sovereign AI solutions tailored for India's market and global clients.

Sarvam has already deployed its AI solutions in high-impact sectors such as banking, insurance, government technology, and defense. Its conversational platform processes over two million interactions daily, while its speech recognition models transcribe more than half a million hours of audio monthly in multilingual Indian contexts. The company has also digitized over 35 million pages of documents, including insurance forms and land records.

Founded in August 2023 by IIT researchers Pratyush Kumar and Vivek Raghavan, Sarvam has rapidly scaled to unicorn status, becoming first Indian AI startup to achieve a $1.5 billion valuation. The company's models, including the 105B and 30B parameter versions, are trained entirely in India and are optimized for local use cases.