AI Startup Sarvam Turns Unicorn After Raising $234 Million In Series B Round

Bengaluru-based AI startup Sarvam entered the unicorn club after raising $234 million in the first close of its $300 million Series B funding round, achieving a $1.5 billion post-money valuation. The round was led by HCLTech, which contributed $150 million as a strategic investor, alongside Bessemer Venture Partners and existing backers Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners. Sarvam positions itself as India’s full-stack sovereign AI platform, focusing on next-generation AI models for agentic AI, coding, and cybersecurity applications. The funding will also expand access to large-scale computing infrastructure and accelerate deployments across key sectors. HCLTech’s investment aims to combine Sarvam’s AI research with its enterprise expertise, engineering talent, and global customer relationships to build a comprehensive sovereign AI ecosystem for India and international markets. C Vijayakumar, CEO and Managing Director of HCLTech, stated that the partnership will create a differentiated full-stack AI platform for enterprises and governments, enabling secure and responsible AI adoption. Sarvam Co-founder Pratyush Kumar emphasized the company’s focus on research-led innovation, particularly in developing AI systems tailored to India’s scale. The company is creating models capable of understanding Indian languages, processing local documents, and delivering affordable intelligence for enterprises and governments. In recent months, Sarvam has expanded its AI portfolio with multiple foundational models trained entirely in India, including Sarvam 105B, which matches or outperforms larger reasoning models on several benchmarks. Sarvam 30B is designed for efficient operation on consumer hardware, while its document intelligence model, Sarvam Vision, is digitizing over 35 million pages of records, from insurance forms to land documents.