AI Firm Sarvam Turns Unicorn After USD 234M Series B Funding

Full-stack AI company Sarvam announced on Monday that it has raised USD 234 million as part of its ongoing USD 300 million Series B round at a post-money valuation of USD 1.5 billion, making the company a unicorn.

HCL Tech, which committed USD 150 million, has led the round while Bessemer Venture Partners along with existing investors Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners.

Back in December 2023, Sarvam AI had raised USD 41 million in a Series A round led by Lightspeed and with participation from Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures in December 2023. 

Founded in 2023 by Dr Vivek Raghavan and Dr Pratyush Kumar, the Bengaluru-based Sarvam builds full-stack, indigenous generative AI platforms and large language models (LLMs) tailored for Indian languages, voice agents, and public service delivery, among others. 

Sarvam says its research has shipped at pace. In the last few months, it has released foundational models, all trained from scratch in India. 

“Sarvam 105B matches or outperforms larger reasoning models on knowledge, reasoning, and agentic benchmarks, while Sarvam 30B is optimised for the edge, running on consumer hardware. Sarvam Vision, built for handwriting and Indian-language records, is being used to digitise over 35 million pages from insurance forms to legacy land records. Sarvam’s speech models work in India’s complex settings, transcribing over half a million hours of audio each month,” the company said in a press release. 

The company added its products are now rapidly scaling and focusing on high-stake verticals like banking, gov tech, defence, and insurance, among others. The company’s conversational platform now handles 2 million interactions a day, with usage doubling in the last two months. Sarvam’s agentic platform is scaling rapidly.

“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. We are positioned to both help them adopt and innovate on AI. The partnership with HCLTech provides a unique example of an Indian corporate helping build foundational strength in AI,” said Sarvam cofounder Raghavan in a statement.