Sarvam, a Bengaluru company that builds AI models in India, raised $234m in the first close of a planned $300m Series B, announced on 15 June 2026. The round values the company at $1.5bn post-money, which The Next Web described as making it India's newest AI unicorn.
HCLTech led with a $150m commitment. Venture Intelligence put its stake at 10.46%. Bessemer Venture Partners joined as a new investor, and existing backers Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners also took part. The remaining roughly $66m of the planned $300m has no announced timeline in the sources opened.
The Next Web did not disclose the size of HCLTech's stake, while Venture Intelligence gave it as 10.46%. Neither source said who else is expected to join the remaining close.
What Sarvam does
Sarvam was founded in 2023 by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, both veterans of AI4Bharat, an Indian-language AI effort at IIT Madras backed by Nandan Nilekani, according to The Next Web. The company describes itself as building India's sovereign AI stack and trains its own models.
The Next Web reported two open-source models, one with 105 billion parameters, which Sarvam says rivals larger models, and one with 30 billion parameters tuned to run on consumer hardware. Both were trained from scratch in India. Venture Intelligence said the company focuses on air-gapped systems and on agentic, coding and cybersecurity uses, and has a model called Sarvam Vision for digitising documents.
Sarvam reports that voice agents collected data from 17 million farmers for India's agriculture ministry, and that a campaign for one insurer reached 45 million policyholders. These usage figures come from the company and were not independently verified.
Sarvam says its platforms handle millions of interactions and API calls every day, according to The Next Web, which did not quote any named executive or investor.
What the money is for
Venture Intelligence said the funds will go to building frontier models, investing in computing infrastructure and deploying frontier applications in banking, insurance, government technology and defence. Neither source gave a spending breakdown.
The Next Web said HCLTech plans to combine Sarvam's models with its enterprise customer relationships and engineering capabilities.
The Next Web said Sarvam's stated focus areas are banking, insurance, government technology and defence. For HCLTech, an IT services group with enterprise customers, the investment is a way to put Sarvam's models in front of those clients alongside its own engineering teams.
The funding so far
Venture Intelligence reported that Sarvam raised about $54m between August 2023 and August 2025 from investors including Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Ventures, Peak XV Partners and VH Capital. It put the company's financial results for the 2025 fiscal year at about INR 2 crore in operating income and about INR 102 crore in net loss.
Neither source gave a headcount or quoted executives, and HCLTech's own announcement could not be opened for this article, so the details here come from the two independent reports.
Company website: sarvam.ai