Sarvam Co-founder Vivek Raghavan

As India’s sovereign Artificial Intelligence (AI) model maker Sarvam turns unicorn with a funding round led by HCL Tech, the start-up believes that along with much-needed capital, the partnership will also help them hone their go-to-market skills for Enterprise AI use cases.

“AI has changed the way software is going to be written; so there is no doubt about the synergies between an IT services company and an AI company. HCL’s investment in Sarvam helps to create a new generation company out of India,” Sarvam Co-founder Vivek Raghavan told businessline. He clarified that there is no exclusivity agreement with HCL Tech regarding the use of Sarvam’s models.

With HCL Tech’s $150 million investment in return for a 10.46 per cent stake, Sarvam will use the money for training models, for inference at large scale, for agentic use cases, and more, he says. Raghavan notes that monetisation is important, but Sarvam will also continue to innovate in building larger models and deeper use cases.

Sarvam is also ramping up hiring and focus will be to get more exceptional people in, said Raghavan. “Predominantly everything will continue to be in India; but we will also get exceptional people who want to help India in this mission but are in the US,” he said, speaking about the recent outreach in the US.

Is the current fundraise sufficient for Sarvam to play in the big leagues?

“This is a good start, but as we look to build bigger models, the capital we have raised now is not sufficient, and we have to look at more avenues of capital surely,” Raghavan said. “We have the opportunity to move faster towards the goals; we have lots of more work to do there,” he said.

Market traction has seen a boost after the momentum created by the India AI Summit, says Raghavan. “Since the Summit, both our voice AI capabilities and API uses have gone up by three-fold in 3 months. That’s a significant increase in adoption, and we see that will continue,” he said.

As for the impact of the Anthropic-US government fallout on India’s sovereign AI ambitions, Raghavan says it is a sign of “what might happen” if we do not have sovereign AI stack. Given the rate at which models are increasing in capability every few weeks and months, more models will start falling into the advanced nature sooner, he noted.

“From a long-term perspective, we need to have the strength to do this [build our own models] ourselves. As a country, we need to have our own capability in the entire AI stack sovereign -from compute to models to agentic infrastructure and more,” he added.

As for the team’s expectations from the policymakers, Sarvam flags the benefits that AI can bring to governance. One way the government can help is by being a large procurer of the sovereign AI models, and it will also lead to efficiency of services, Raghavan said.

Sarvam is confident of closing the remaining portion of the investment round within the next few weeks, but did not disclose the names of the investors.

Published on June 15, 2026