Sarvam AI enters unicorn club with $234 million funding led by HCLTech
15 Jun 2026, 11:12 PMVenture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners joined the cap table as a new investor, while existing backers Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners also participated in the funding round.
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Sarvam AI has raised $234 million in an ongoing funding round led by HCLTech, valuing the startup at $1.5 billion and making it India's latest unicorn.
The funding round, which is expected to close at around $300 million, includes a strategic investment of $150 million from HCLTech alone. Venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners joined the cap table as a new investor, while existing backers Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners also participated in the funding round.
The deal is significant not just because of its size, making it the largest funding round for an Indian foundational AI model company, but also because it marks one of the first major bets by a listed Indian IT services company on the country's emerging AI infrastructure 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," said C Vijayakumar, CEO, HCLTech, in a company statement.
Founded in 2023 by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, Sarvam is building India-focused large language models and AI infrastructure designed for local languages and sovereign use cases. Earlier this year, the startup unveiled its first foundation models -- Sarvam-30B and Sarvam-105B -- with support for 22 Indian languages.
The fundraise comes at a time when India's ambitions around sovereign AI have gathered momentum, particularly after recent US restrictions on access to some of Anthropic's advanced AI models. The episode has amplified calls for India to develop greater self-reliance in critical AI infrastructure, from foundational models to computing capacity.
Even so, the scale of capital available to Indian AI startups remains modest compared to global peers. Companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic have raised tens of billions of dollars to build and train frontier AI systems, highlighting the vast resource gap that domestic players continue to navigate.
Sarvam says the fresh capital will help it deepen investments across the AI stack rather than focus solely on training models. According to the company, the funding will support the buildout of compute infrastructure, training frameworks, large-scale inferencing capabilities and agentic AI orchestration.
"If you want to be completely Atmanirbhar in AI, we need to play across all these layers. This funding enables us to accelerate across them and build the full stack needed to be self-reliant in AI," the company said in a statement.
The startup's products are already being deployed across sectors including banking, insurance, government technology and defence. It says its conversational AI platform now handles more than two million interactions a day, with usage having doubled over the last two months. Its enterprise customers include SBI Life, Life Insurance Corporation, IDFC First Bank, Tata Capital and Cred.
According to a regulatory filing by HCLTech, Sarvam generated revenue of Rs 45 crore during FY26.
For Bessemer Venture Partners, which is also an investor in US-based AI company Anthropic, the investment extends its AI thesis to India's growing sovereign AI ecosystem.
"We believe this is going to be India's AI decade. AI will diffuse into every aspect of our lives—citizen workflows, enterprise workflows and government workflows," said Pankaj Mitra, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners.
Sarvam was last valued at around $110 million in 2023, when it raised funding from Peak XV, Khosla Ventures and Lightspeed.
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