Bengaluru-based Sarvam AI has raised $234 million in the first close of a $300 million Series B round, the company announced on June 15, crossing the $1 billion valuation to become India's newest unicorn. The round values the sovereign AI startup at $1.5 billion post-money. 

HCLTech is the lead strategic investor, putting in $150 million, with Bessemer Venture Partners joining the round alongside existing investors Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners.

"Our investment in Sarvam marks a significant step toward building India's trusted and globally competitive AI ecosystem," said C Vijayakumar, CEO and MD of HCLTech. "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 was founded by Pratyush Kumar and Vivek Raghavan, both veterans of AI4Bharat, the IIT Madras-based language AI initiative. 

The fresh capital will go toward training Sarvam's next frontier model, with a focus on agentic, coding, and cybersecurity use cases, and toward expanding compute access to scale its forward-deployed operations across key verticals.

"We are clear that research-led innovation to create AI that works at India's scale is a very large opportunity," said co-founder Pratyush Kumar.

"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," Kumar added.

Sarvam has released two flagship models in recent months, both trained from scratch in India. Sarvam 105B is a large reasoning model the company says matches or outperforms larger rivals on knowledge, reasoning, and agentic benchmarks. Sarvam 30B is optimised for edge deployment on consumer hardware.

The company has also released Sarvam Vision, a model built for handwriting recognition and Indian-language documents, which is being used to digitise over 35 million pages spanning insurance forms and land records.

"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," said co-founder Vivek Raghavan. "The partnership with HCLTech provides a unique example of an Indian corporate helping build foundational strength in India."

Sarvam did not disclose the timeline for closing the remaining $66 million of the round.