Sarvam, India’s full-stack sovereign AI startup, has raised $234 million in the first close of a $300 million Series B round, at a post-money valuation of $1.5 billion.
HCL Technologies Ltd led the round, committing $150 million as the lead investor and picking up a 10.46% stake, according to regulatory filings. Bessemer Venture Partners joined the company’s cap table alongside the IT major. Existing investors Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners also participated in the round.
The Bengaluru-based company is yet to raise the remaining $66 million of its $300 million target and has not disclosed a timeline for the final close.
The announcement comes just after the US government directed US foundational model company Anthropic to restrict use of its latest models, Fable 5 and cybersecurity-focused Mythos, citing export-control rules.
Sovereign AI ambition
The capital will fund Sarvam’s next frontier model—targeting agentic, coding, and cybersecurity use cases—and deepen its forward-deployed motion across banking, insurance, government technology, and defence.
“We are clear that research-led innovation to create AI that works at India’s scale is a very large opportunity. That means models that understand our voices, read our documents, and serve intelligence at a cost every enterprise and government can afford,” said Pratyush Kumar, co-founder, Sarvam in a statement.
Sarvam positions itself as India’s answer to sovereign AI—a full-stack company that trains its own models from scratch in India, rather than fine-tuning foreign models on Indian data.
“Our ambition is to diffuse this technology widely in the country, creating significant value across sectors for citizens, small businesses, enterprises, and state and central governments. We are positioned to both help them adopt and innovate on AI,” said Vivek Raghavan, co-founder, Sarvam, in the statement.
India’s sovereign AI ambitions are reaching an inflexion point. As global AI development concentrates among a handful of American and Chinese labs, a growing cluster of governments and enterprises is seeking AI infrastructure that keeps data, models, and inference loops within national borders.
“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, chief executive and managing director, HCLTech, in the statement.
Sarvam AI models
Sarvam’s model portfolio has expanded considerably in recent months. Its models include the 105B model, which claims to match or outperform larger reasoning models on knowledge, reasoning, and agentic benchmarks. Its Sarvam 30B variant is optimized for edge deployment on consumer hardware.
It has also released Sarvam Vision, a model built for handwriting and Indian-language document recognition, which is being used to digitize over 35 million pages of insurance forms and land records.
This is the company’s latest round of funding, coming two-and-a-half years after Sarvam first raised capital from investors. Back in 2023, the startup raised $41 million in a combined seed and Series A round from Khosla Ventures and PeakXV Partners.