Sarvam has become India’s newest artificial intelligence (AI) unicorn, raising $234 million in the first close of a $300 million Series B round that values the startup at $1.5 billion. It now joins Krutrim as one of only two Indian AI unicorns in a market where it also faces Reliance Jio’s $120 billion AI commitment and the IT majors pivoting to AI-first strategies.
The investors:
- HCLTech leads the round with a $150 million investment, acquiring a 10.46% stake for Rs 1,427.25 crore.
- Bessemer Venture Partners has joined the round alongside existing investors Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners.
- Lightspeed Venture Partners has sat out the round despite leading Sarvam’s earlier funding round.
Sarvam has not disclosed a timeline for closing the remaining $66 million. The startup will use the capital to fund its next-generation frontier model for agentic AI, coding, and cybersecurity use cases, as well as to secure compute capacity at scale. It plans to expand deployments across four verticals: banking, insurance, government technology, and defence.
The valuation reflects a clear bet on future scale. Sarvam reported revenue of Rs 45.1 crore in 2025-26, compared with a previous valuation of around $196 million in 2025. The company says usage is scaling rapidly. Its conversational platform now handles more than 2 million interactions a day, doubling in two months, while its inference platform processes 10 million application programming interface (API) calls daily, tripling in three months.
Its government pipeline is also widening. The company signed sovereign AI infrastructure Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) with Tamil Nadu for the Digital Sangam research park with IIT Madras and with Odisha for a 50-megawatt (MW) compute facility, both in February 2026.
The raise marks a turnaround for Sarvam. The government selected the startup in April 2025 to build India’s first sovereign Large Language Model (LLM) under the IndiaAI Mission, but it faced scepticism over its pace of development and low download numbers.
Critics also pointed out that its May 2025 model, Sarvam-M, was built by fine-tuning a foreign foundation model with Indian data rather than being developed from scratch. Sarvam responded to those concerns at the AI Impact Summit in February 2026 by launching two models trained from scratch on Indian-language datasets.
The funding further sharpens India’s sovereign AI push. It comes just days after the United States (US) government blocked foreign nationals from accessing Anthropic’s latest models, deepening concerns about reliance on overseas providers. Sarvam co-founder Pratyush Kumar linked the funding round directly to that development, writing on X: “You should not confuse access with ownership, or adoption itself as advantage.”
The government is funding Sarvam as one of 12 organisations building foundational models under the IndiaAI Mission, positioning it as a full-stack Indian…
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