Sarvam has secured $234 million in funding at a $1.5 billion valuation, as announced on Monday. This milestone makes the Bengaluru-based startup India’s newest AI unicorn, reflecting a growing push by governments and companies to gain greater control over critical artificial intelligence technologies and computing infrastructure. Of the total, $150 million comes from HCLTech, the IT arm of Indian conglomerate HCL Group, which serves as the lead strategic investor in this round. Bessemer Venture Partners also joined, alongside existing backers Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners. Sarvam aims to raise a total of $300 million for its Series B round.

This investment arrives more than two years after Sarvam raised $41 million across its seed and Series A rounds, and follows the startup’s launch of open-source models with 30 billion and 105 billion parameters earlier this year. The new funding underscores a broader trend: countries and corporations are increasingly focused on developing sovereign AI capabilities, driven by concerns over access to advanced models and the computing infrastructure that powers them. Sarvam is among a handful of startups working to build a full-stack AI business, encompassing model development, inference infrastructure, and enterprise applications. The company says its models are tailored for Indian languages and use cases, with products deployed across sectors such as banking, insurance, government services, and defense.

HCLTech’s investment provides Sarvam with a well-funded strategic partner as it works to commercialize its technology. The plan involves combining Sarvam’s AI models with HCLTech’s enterprise relationships, engineering workforce, and software assets to create AI products for businesses and governments. This funding comes as India solidifies its position as one of the world’s most important AI markets. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have cited India as their second-largest market after the U.S., fueled by the country’s large base of developers, enterprises, and consumers adopting AI tools.

Despite its strength as an AI consumer, India has produced few serious contenders in the race to develop frontier AI models. High computing costs and limited access to capital have made it difficult for Indian startups to compete with well-funded rivals in the U.S. and China, leaving Sarvam among a small group of companies attempting to build homegrown foundation models. The debate over AI sovereignty gained fresh urgency last week when Anthropic disabled access to its latest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, after the U.S. government ordered the company to suspend their use by any foreign national, citing national security concerns. This move highlighted how access to cutting-edge AI systems remains concentrated among a small number of overseas providers.

With the new investment, Sarvam says it will fund research into its next-generation AI models focused on agentic, coding, and cybersecurity applications, while also expanding access to computing infrastructure as it scales deployments across industries. The startup reports that its conversational AI platform now handles more than 2 million interactions per day, while its inference platform processes roughly 10 million API calls daily. Its speech models transcribe over 500,000 hours of audio each month, and its document AI systems are being used to digitize more than 35 million pages of records. These tools are increasingly deployed at scale.

The company says its multilingual voice agents have collected data from 17 million farmers for India’s Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare. Additionally, a nationwide voice campaign for a leading insurer helped support policy renewals for 45 million policyholders. Beyond government and consumer-facing applications, Sarvam notes that a large fintech company is using its agentic AI platform to support a sales force of more than 350,000 people. Founded by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, who previously worked at AI4Bharat—an Indian-language AI research initiative at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras backed by technology veteran Nandan Nilekani—the startup aims to spread AI technology widely across India. “Our ambition is to diffuse this technology widely in India, creating significant value across sectors for citizens, small businesses, enterprises, and state and central governments,” Raghavan said. “We are positioned to both help them adopt and innovate on AI.”