Sarvam, an AI company based in India, has secured $234m in the first close of a planned $300m Series B funding round, resulting in a post-money valuation of $1.5bn.
The investment round saw Indian IT company HCLTech act as the lead strategic investor, agreeing to contribute $150m. Bessemer Venture Partners also participated, alongside existing backers Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners.
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The new capital is intended to support Sarvam’s ongoing research and development, particularly in training its next advanced AI models for applications in agentic functions, coding, and cybersecurity.
The investment will also be used to expand computing infrastructure to allow for deployment across sectors involving enterprises, developers, and government agencies.
HCLTech CEO and managing director C Vijayakumar said: “Our investment in Sarvam marks a significant step towards building India’s trusted and globally competitive AI ecosystem.
“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.”
Sarvam develops AI products that address a spectrum of needs, including training and inference infrastructure, model research, and tools for business and government clients.
The company’s recent output includes foundational language and vision models, all developed entirely in India.
Its Sarvam 105B model is claimed to perform at a level comparable to, or better than, larger models on benchmarks focused on knowledge, reasoning, and task-oriented performance.
The lighter Sarvam 30B model is optimised to run on consumer hardware, while Sarvam Vision is being applied to digitise documents such as insurance forms and land records, with 35 million pages processed so far.
Speech recognition models from Sarvam are said to be transcribing over half a million hours of audio each month in multilingual and complex Indian contexts.
Sarvam co-founder Pratyush Kumar said: “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.
“Building on this template, we are innovating on a full-stack offering for enterprises to own and operate their own sovereign AI.”
The company’s products are said to be used in high-impact sectors such as banking, insurance, government technology, and defence. Its conversational platform is claimed to manage over two million interactions daily.
In late 2023, Sarvam raised $41m in its Series A round led by Lightspeed and participation from Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures.
